Allora, Magari
by Yeade
Summary: Schwann turns out to have been something a little more complicated to Alexei than just a tool to be used and discarded. Raven hadn't wanted to remember at all and reacts badly, but Yuri's not about to let him get away from the rest of them so easily as that, in the name of the brightest star in the night sky.
1. Falling (Falling Further)

New fandom! Finished playing the Definitive Edition and got a strange, uncontrollable urge to write something. So, here's my take on a concept that's undoubtedly featured in TOV doujinshi, but that I've yet to see in a long (very long!) form English fanfic. I'm aware that Raven's backstory was given more detail in a light novel/drama CD/spin-off manga, and I've looked over the Japanese raws of the last and been reading **dokidokimaster**'s awesome scanlations on Tumblr (/tagged/kokuu+no+kamen). But, suffice to say, this will be going pretty dang AU in regards to Alexei's relationship with Schwann, and likewise all the rest from Casey/Canary's name to the post-game world order is subject to my possibly misinformed, overly liberal interpretation. Anyways, I hope I've done the setting and characters justice. Please enjoy! Constructive criticism is welcome!

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**Allora, Magari**

_Falling (Falling Further)_

**· · ·**

If Raven had known what a mess delivering Yuri's packet of letters would make of his life, he'd have thrown them into the hands of the first Royal Guard he met at the castle gates, maybe shouted that they were for the Commandant on his way out of Zaphias, then hied himself down to Nor Harbor quick as can be and jumped aboard the next ship back to Dahngrest or even Nordopolica. Better yet, he wouldn't have volunteered to play messenger boy to begin with.

Was Yuri's need to share all the gossipy guild news with Flynn and Estelle so great that he really couldn't wait for Judith to return to Aurnion with Ba'ul? She could've detoured to the capital in less than half the time Raven spent traveling by sea and overland, and everyone would've been happier for it, himself foremost. Privately, of course, Raven admitted he never could've refused Yuri's request, casual as it was. His life belonged to Brave Vesperia, after all, and besides, like the big old sap he was nowadays, he found it hard to deny that crazy bunch anything which might please them in some small, innocent way.

Especially where it concerned Estelle and Flynn. Whom he hadn't done any favors as Schwann, leaving them and His Majesty Ioder to root out corrupt councilmen and the last of Alexei's supporters among the Knights while he mostly bummed around three continents, occasionally four, in his rather anomalous position as the Empire's liaison to the Union and the Union's liaison to the Empire. On top of that, neither Ioder nor Harry had seen fit to revoke his authority as Captain Schwann or a ranking guildsman of Altosk, despite him being a traitor and generally negligent in his duties to both. An honorary member of Brave Vesperia, too—inducted into the five master guilds, to Karol's pride, in place of Ruins' Gate alongside the Hunting Blades, for the Blood Alliance—Raven figured hardly anyone could tell who exactly he was working for.

Honestly, it was enough to make even his two-faced head spin, during the joint conferences that sprang up every few months as the world coped with drastic changes in the wake of vanquishing the Adephagos. And Raven was fine with that! His loyalties, though many and varied, were plain for all to see, and for the most part, he just did as he felt was right. None of his current masters was as demanding or ruthless as Alexei and Don Whitehorse were. The idealism of youth, he mused, not untried but still fresh as the blossoms of Halure in spring.

Which was why, when Flynn asked Raven for a favor, he agreed. When Flynn explained further that he meant to send a number of Alexei's recently unearthed coded journals to Rita, Witcher, and the former mages of Aspio in the Tarqaron ruins, Raven swallowed his unease and let the young Commandant lead them through the castle halls as if Schwann hadn't lived there, on and off, for more than a decade.

"Since you're here," said Flynn, "I was hoping you might have some insight on where else Alexei could have secreted away his research. We thought we'd cleared his rooms and the library of all his notes but, well, then these journals turned up in a light fixture on the ceiling." He sighed, shaking his head. "I doubt we'd ever have discovered them if the workmen hadn't been removing blastia housings throughout the entire castle."

Flynn stopped in front of a closed door Raven knew, in a corner of the castle he'd scrupulously avoided after betraying Alexei. It was by then far too late to flee Zaphias without raising questions he wasn't sure he could answer. Oblivious to Raven's growing horror, Flynn unlocked the door to Alexei's personal quarters and waved him in first, shutting the door again behind them with a quiet, very final snick.

Nothing had changed, that Raven could see, aside from the missing light fixture. The furniture, all tasteful dark wood, was unmoved: bookshelves, lining one wall from floor to ceiling; an imposing desk, lodged between the two rightmost of the room's four tall windows, that adjoined the canopied bed with its wardrobe; a pair of upholstered couches and their matching armchairs around a low table; a glass-paned cabinet for serving drinks. How like Flynn to be respectful of a dead man's belongings even as he ordered every drawer and every book searched for evidence of Alexei's treason. The bed was made, pillows fluffed, and the rich red drapes drawn open, as if the maids had come to clean and air the room in expectation of its former occupant's return.

Raven couldn't help it. He felt Schwann stiffening his spine; his heels came together and his shoulders squared to create the image of an obedient soldier at attention. Only without Schwann's curtain of hair, his face was suddenly too exposed. Though he'd reported to Alexei here more times than he could count, when resuming Schwann's duties after a long stint with the guilds or his information was deemed too sensitive to be heard in the Commandant's centrally accessible office, there was something about being in this room that immediately set his hackles on edge.

Every muscle in his body screamed with an impulse to either pull out his dagger and strike swiftly, at what he couldn't say, or cast his most powerful wind spell as a distraction to escape, from what he couldn't say. That wasn't right or sane, Raven was well aware, but he didn't want to look too closely at what was wrong.

As much as he and the others joked about his conveniently patchy old man's memory, the sad truth of the matter was that there really were things he couldn't remember: people and places familiar to him but empty of any sensation, like he'd read about them in some book, not experienced them himself, and worse, gaping holes in his mental timeline of events, mostly as Schwann, that frightened him in a way death no longer did. Because if he could recall in perfect detail the men he'd murdered on Alexei's orders, what deeds of his were so terrible that his mind sought to hide them from him?

For years until he fell in with Yuri's strange collection of friends, to Raven's shame, Casey and his comrades in the Canary Brigade were in the first category. Intellectually, he knew he fought in the Great War. He remembered training as a Knight, the fellowship of his brothers in arms, and could picture his dauntless captain, peerless in his young eyes, even recognize that he admired her deeply, before it all came to a bad end, the good ones dead too soon. But there was no strong emotion attached to these memories.

He must've been mad with pain when he awoke to the hum of a blastia in his chest—inexplicably, _inexcusably_ alive. He'd tried to kill himself, or so Alexei claimed. His own impressions of the weeks and months his body spent trying to learn how to function again were hopelessly muddled. When his consciousness finally cleared, he was Schwann. Thankfully, not so physically ill he could barely crawl out of bed, but cut off from his previous life as sharply as if he were truly a different person.

It was easier then to just pretend that was so and do as Alexei wished. Raven was grateful Brave Vesperia's chase of Judith led him back to Temza. Where he couldn't distance himself from his past or deny his ghosts their due, much as he hated it at the time. Perhaps one day he might travel to what remained of his hometown, too, and rescue those memories from the hazy isolation they were still abandoned in.

That didn't mean he had any desire to fill in the rest of the blanks. With Casey and his old brigade, his family and his earliest years of harmless, if naively blithe, troublemaking, there were happy moments he could recover to treasure. From context, however, his missing memories all involved Alexei, and that was a warning to leave them be which Raven fully intended to heed. He'd already told everything he could remember of Alexei's plans to Flynn, Ioder, and Estelle that might be relevant to reforming the Empire. Likewise, he'd shared everything he knew, which wasn't much in the end, about his blastia with Rita, who didn't need his help once she got exclusive access to the blastia itself and Alexei's research.

What was left, Raven decided, wasn't anybody else's business. Who wanted to hear about how desperate he was to please Alexei? Beyond the threat of death hanging over his head, like a sword he at last prayed would fall, Raven thought he was simply so starved for some purpose in his wretched waste of a life that even Alexei's attentions, which were probably never more than a master's for his dog, seemed preferable to none at all. Though Don Whitehorse's hand was gentler, Raven was a tool to be used either way. And he'd found a perverse sense of pride in being a finely honed one that he didn't dwell on these days, lest he slip into bad habits that would see Flynn clapping him in chains.

Difficult enough that he was forced to accept the Knights would always consider him Schwann first and foremost. Well, with the exceptions of Leblanc, Adecor, and Boccos. They only called him Captain Schwann half the time when they forgot to call him Sir Raven, bless their earnest, bumbling hearts. Both the Knights' latest recruits and the veterans of established brigades, on up to retired old soldiers like Drake, continued to hold Schwann as worthy of their respect.

Personally, Raven blamed Flynn, who couldn't quite manage to shake his regard for Schwann. Young men and women from every walk of life, dazzled by the lofty ideal of defending the now barrierless people, flocked to Zaphias to serve under the charismatic new Commandant who, besides being as young as they, was unfortunately prone to singing the First Captain's praises when he got into the mood. Schwann had nearly ducked out of the initiation ceremonies for several brigades of fresh-faced Knights when Flynn started a speech about how he was an example to them all, his promises of a dignified public appearance be damned.

He blamed the misguided notion that he was in any way critical to saving the world or fostering peace with the guilds for the others. Which he owed to Estelle and her wildly popular book about Brave Vesperia's adventures. She'd written him as some sort of tragic hero, kept captive to Alexei's madness by his devotion to the good man the former Commandant once was. His noble act of self-sacrifice at Baction featured prominently; the fact that they wouldn't have been in such a fix to begin with had he not kidnapped Estelle was glossed over and mentions of his blastia heart excised completely with a deftness he frankly admired.

The final result, at any rate, was that there were rather too many well-meaning folks who had no idea what a coward Schwann really was and, to Raven's bemusement, he was in no hurry to disabuse them of their hopeful view that not every remnant of the old regime was rotten to the core. An infinitely easier role to play if Schwann could refrain from giving Raven more reason to think him a pathetic mutt begging at Alexei's heels.

No, there was nothing to be gained in unraveling the mystery of his memories. He'd survived for years half a shadow of a dead man, half a reflection of that shadow, and he counted himself lucky that Raven proved to be made of truer substance than he believed.

As usual when he was resolved to take a certain course of action, however, people and events conspired to deliver him another fate entirely at odds with what he wished. Flynn was talking. He slowly paced the room to study the wall sconces and decorative relief carvings—presumably in search of more hidden compartments—tapping the floor here and there with his armored foot. But Raven had stopped listening.

Shadows lingered at the edges of his vision where they shouldn't exist, and he twitched restlessly trying not to see them. White and black and red, they were. The weight of half remembered conversations was suffocating. He felt dizzy, like he couldn't get enough air. And queasy with nerves, his stomach churning. "Captain Schwann, are you well?" a man—_Flynn_, Raven thought—said.

It was Flynn—he _knew_ it was—but the voice twisted in Raven's ears, bright tenor dropping lower, growing deeper and darker. Nobody had asked after Schwann so damn tenderly, had cared enough for him to bother, since—he closed his eyes against the sudden stab of memory—Alexei, always _Alexei_. Normally, he'd berate Flynn for calling him Schwann when he was out of uniform, having given up on convincing Flynn that name and guise ought to be retired permanently.

Now, though, his tongue was leaden in his dry mouth. Raven didn't think he could summon the will to smile and banter and brush off his moment of panic if the whole world depended upon it. And panicking he was, as a hundred, a thousand forgotten memories sleeted over his mind like glass shards. The firm press of a hand on the crown of his bowed head, the ridge of his bared spine. Fingers stroking idly through his hair—no, yanking on it so hard tears welled in his eyes. A bruising grip on his wrists, his jaw. Was his hair down then or tied up? The ache of strained muscles in his arms soothed by cool sheets, a warm cocoon of blankets. _Shit, shit..._ He remembered waking in Alexei's bed. Slicking the back of his throat was a bitter, salty wetness. Raven almost gagged at the taste.

A hand fell on his shoulder. Light as the touch was, it burned like a brand, and he jerked out of reach with a cry. Up came his dagger from its sheath and into guard position. His breathing rasped in his ears, far too fast, as his gaze darted about the room in search of the Commandant. There was only Flynn, of course, brow creased with worry. "Captain Schwann," he said again, hands raised in surrender, "it's me. Is something the matter?"

Raven wanted to laugh but was afraid he'd sound hysterical. All this time, he figured Alexei saw him as little better than a dog. Turned out that assumption was wrong, though it was for sure no comfort to realize Alexei deemed him human enough to _fuck_. Or perhaps—dammit, Raven had to stop his mind from reeling over every ugly implication before he did something rash, like put his knife to his own throat—Alexei just upped and decided one day that his tool had other uses than spying and killing.

_That's me, all right_, he thought sourly. _Multipurpose and ready to serve!_ Had Alexei needed stress relief from long hours of being a sick, evil bastard? Raven's chest hurt, and he clutched at his blastia. The pulsing energy of his false heart warmed the metal that housed it, the sharp hooks sunk into his flesh, and seeped through his shirt into his palm, as it did occasionally when his emotions ran too hot. For a second, he could hear darlin' Rita scolding him for letting himself get so wound up. _Calm down! Gotta keep my cool here..._ This was not the time or place to fall apart. Not in his present company.

With a mental wrench, he forced himself to focus on Flynn's surcoat: a clean, loyal blue that was the complete opposite of the rich red Alexei preferred. Hand clenched white-knuckled on his dagger, he managed to sheathe the blade, nearly fumbling an action he could do in his sleep as his arm trembled uncontrollably. The ghost of a touch brushed across the nape of his neck, and it didn't take much to imagine fingers closing tight about his throat like a collar. Lips at his ear, whispering in a voice he'd once known to obey.

"Captain Schwann?" Flynn again. Stubborner than Repede gnawing on a tasty bone. Raven supposed they both had to be to keep pace with Yuri. Alexei always called him Schwann, too, the name particularly heavy coming from him. Possessive, in a way the Don wasn't, despite each having a claim on his life, and more consuming than Alexei's creation of his identity as Schwann warranted. Or so he believed. "Can you hear me? Please respond!" With these unwanted memories crammed into his head, Raven couldn't find fault in Alexei's presumption that Schwann belonged to him and him alone.

If Raven didn't leave soon, he'd go stark raving mad and blurt out all the sordid details to Flynn. Who really didn't deserve to be saddled with cleaning up another of Alexei's messes. "H-Hey, Flynn," he said and hated how his voice shook. "Looks like I ain't gonna be able ta do ya that favor right now."

He edged away—steady, steady, _can't show fear_—from Flynn's grave look of concern until his outstretched hand found the wall, the door, and could begin groping around for an exit. "In fact, if ya don't mind, I'll just be goin'. Won't be back ta Zaphias for a spell, got other places ta visit"—that was the truth—"other people ta see"—a lie and hopefully one that'll send his pursuers chasing rumors from town to town as his trail grew cold—"you understand how it is."

Finally, the door handle! "Ol' Raven's in demand these days! I'll make it up ta ya later, Flynn!" He laughed, and it was a thin, pathetic sound. Then he turned on his heel and _ran_, not ashamed to be a coward in this, Flynn's shouts to wait echoing ignored behind him. None of the Knights standing guard or on patrol tried to stop him, to his relief; he barely noticed their confused salutes as he sped past them.

Out the castle doors, through the gates he fled and down the stairs to the public quarter before he had to slow, his lungs afire. Pay no attention to the disheveled old man panting, bent over hands on knees, in the middle of the square, he thought at the market crowds, fruitlessly. The sensation of eyes watching him crawled over his skin; he itched to gouge every inch of it bloody and raw. For once, he wished his coat wasn't such a bright purple but, no, he gripped his head in one hand and berated himself for even considering altering the colors and pattern the Don said suited Raven.

Eventually, he pushed his aching body into a brisk walk back to the lower quarter inn he was staying at. What was it about him that made people want to see him in garish clothes? The archer's set gifted to him by the Schwann Brigade and His Majesty Ioder, which he wore on missions for both the guilds and Knights nowadays when he anticipated a bit of fighting, was fine as anything his wardrobe could boast yet green as fresh shoots of grass and not in a fashion that might pass for camouflage. Hell, the staff of the Sagittarius had dug up that cheerfully lurid yellow outfit for him when Brave Vesperia was still doing odd jobs around Dahngrest. Struggling to wait tables, in this case, as a smirking Yuri relaxed at the bar with Repede.

It was soothing to remember Leblanc, Adecor, and Boccos, the pride glowing on their faces, and Brave Vesperia's antics that night. Estelle so graceful as she threaded between the tables and gracious as only a born princess could be while Karol was too embarrassed to leave the kitchen, where he was naturally roped into helping cook, his apron not so bad in the end. Rita's pleased flush every time a patron complimented her on how cute she looked; Judith, beautiful as ever, wearing a scandalous number with a queenly poise that, if Raven were honest, was more attractive than her long legs and curvaceous figure. The quivery feeling that he was holding the pieces of himself from flying asunder eased, and he swallowed a grateful sob. Until he remembered, too, that Alexei had chosen orange for Schwann.

Was there no part of him that Alexei had left untouched? Meticulous as Alexei was, it was probably no accident that Schwann was neatly trimmed in the red of the Commandant and Royal Guard. Had Alexei also stripped him out of that uniform? Raven just wasn't sure. He needed time and someplace quiet with no witnesses to sort through his new-old memories. And why, _why_, by the spirits, couldn't he seem to decide whether Alexei forced him or—he choked on bile, rushing up the inn stairs to his room—he was willing? Which would be worse?

_Does it matter?_ he wondered, heaving his guts out into the small sink in one corner. Wasn't that the story of his life? Choosing when all the choices were equally terrible, only to discover later that his choices didn't change a damn thing. Casey was still dead and Don Whitehorse, Yeager, his comrades, his family gone to the grave, every last one of them, and still he lived on and on.

Exhausted, Raven stumbled over to shut the door, locking it, then slumped down to sit curled on the floor at its foot. His cheeks were wet. So he wrapped his arms around his knees and buried his face in the folds of his sleeves. Finally, he let himself cry. Great shuddering gasps wrenched their way out of him, until he felt his chest would burst from the pressure, what remained of his ribs splintering. But he couldn't stop, weeping like a child.

Some sick part of him _missed_ Alexei. Missed Alexei's hands carefully cupping his face, Alexei's smooth voice telling him he'd done well, and the prickling heat of another's body sharing his space, so near and present. _Why do I still _feel_ for the bastard?_ Was he really so pathetic? He must truly be desperate for any scraps of affection, even half remembered, to return to the man who used him for years and abused him to beg for more, more—oh, please, master, please. That was the worst thing of all.

**· · ·**

Captain Schwann was much admired in the Imperial Knights and so the object of endless talk by the lower ranks. Word of his doings in Zaphias would inevitably reach even Alexei's ears. As overawed as the men seemed standing at attention before their commandant to make a report, it was remarkable how easily they forgot his presence when seated at an unobtrusive corner table, head bent over a tall stack of papers. These training yard and mess hall rumors usually amounted to little more than an embellished retelling of Schwann's daily routine:

A guard on the eastern gate watched the Captain ride in at dawn, his shoulders still straight though his uniform was dusty with the many leagues he must have traveled on another of his secret missions for the Commandant. (Alexei knew Schwann kept rooms at boarding houses in near every town and village from Zaphias to Dahngrest, each rented under some entirely different guise, with changes in clothes, gald, weapons, and other stores. It wouldn't do for Don Whitehorse's right hand man to be seen in the Imperial capital too often, after all, when he had no guild business there.)

The Schwann Brigade was out at the archery butts again this afternoon. No doubt part of the Captain's efforts to impress upon the men at his command that learning how to hold a bow, perhaps fire a couple arrows might come in handy. It was certainly no surprise that a warrior as dedicated as Captain Schwann had taught himself to be proficient in more arms than the sword alone, where he was a match for the best the Knights had to offer. (Schwann was far beyond merely competent with a bow, Alexei knew, the sword not his weapon of choice but one Alexei had trained him in to further distance him from the long dead Canary Brigade.)

When did Captain Schwann sleep? That was a topic of heated debate ever since the midnight patrol, espying a lantern's glow in the darkened castle halls and fearing theft, burst into the Captain's modest office to instead catch him writing correspondence at his desk. Once chuckles at the watchmen's reactions to their superior's bland inquiry about what the emergency was quieted down, speculation turned to how frequently the patrols found the Captain hard at work now that they'd adjusted their rounds to report to him. How did the man stay on his feet, never mind have the energy to spar and order them about in grueling exercises, with what couldn't be more than four hours of rest each night?

(None had guessed what Alexei knew. While Schwann regularly toiled into the wee hours of the morning appeasing the Empire's bureaucrats, whom Alexei too despised, as to the supply and running of his brigade, the guilds in contrast committed little to paper aside from oaths of membership and contracts, the financial records of Fortune's Market excepted. Filing documents was not a task Whitehorse would set for his spy, emissary, enforcer, and sometime assassin. When the Don didn't require the services of Schwann's alter ego? If the way Schwann, playing this Raven character, would seize any opportunity to be arrested for carousing and tossed in a cell to sleep off drink he didn't imbibe were an indication, Alexei had to assume Whitehorse let him do as he pleased and what pleased him best was to waste the day napping.)

Listening personally to the gossip of common soldiers would be beneath him, had the matter not concerned his First Captain. And so far as Alexei heard, Schwann was sober and disciplined, talented, intelligent, and unfailing in his every duty; he was the very model of an Imperial Knight, though rather too humorless for friendly company. Yet his habitual grimness was readily pardoned in light of his famed role in the Great War.

For who could say what horrors Captain Schwann had witnessed? If he hardly smiled and never laughed, always attentive to his subordinates but not one to fraternize after hours at the local taverns as did most other officers, well, who could blame him? That the Captain continued to hold his grief for his lost comrades so close to his heart so many years later just made him a good man. There was not a worthy knight in his brigade or, indeed, the whole order who didn't respect Captain Schwann's need to keep them all at arm's length or honor his moral courage in leading them ably despite that.

Schwann was nothing like the slovenly persona he'd created for Whitehorse. His two lives were painstakingly crafted to be as different as possible, so even the most astute observers were left with but a passing thought of strangeness. When Alexei considered how smoothly Schwann maneuvered between them, he felt a distinct sense of satisfaction for having chosen rightly.

However excellent a tool Yeager was for acquiring research materials and undermining the guilds from within, his mind wasn't as strong or steady as Schwann's. Too flighty and unreliable, full of eccentricities and prone to fits of emotion—that foolishness with the orphanage in Capua Torim—no, Alexei couldn't count on Yeager to be his second in dealing with the cutthroat politics of the Empire. Thus Alexei was almost alarmed to discover one day that some of Schwann's habits were changing.

It began with the flowers. A group of off-duty Knights was surprised to find Captain Schwann at market and not browsing the grocer's wares, the vintner's, the tailor's, or any of the other luxuries they imagined he could afford on his officer's stipend. He was instead at the florist's, and as they peeked furtively at him from behind a nearby stall, he purchased a small bouquet of flame-colored blooms, then returned to the castle without once noticing his watchers. By evening the next day, the story going around was that the Captain had a mysterious lady love. So beautiful and charming, it was said, that only for her would he let down his soldierly guard.

That was nonsense, Alexei knew. Schwann understood all too well the dangers of becoming intimate with a woman when he had an illegal experimental blastia for a heart. Alexei himself made certain to impart that warning to Schwann not long after he was resurrected a new man, by the simple expedient of sending him to silence the civilian doctor who'd confirmed his death and operated on him at Alexei's bidding. What's more, Alexei had no worries that Schwann would ever seek to break this prohibition. It was obvious Schwann hated the thing in his chest and would've clawed it out were it not vital to keeping safe what Alexei owned.

Assured that Schwann was barely fit for friendship, so thoroughly repulsed was he by his very existence, Alexei dismissed any thought of the Captain and romantic liaisons. It would not be the first time a tale based on hearsay grew in the telling. Then, during the funeral service for a Knight without family who'd died defending a merchant caravan from monsters, Alexei spotted a bright splash of color upon the grave of the Canary Brigade's commander.

Not until that moment had he realized Schwann might be trying to reconnect with his past. When he was a young rake of a noble who would've delighted in frivolous gestures like buying flowers for a lady and when he was the amiable lieutenant of a close-knit unit whose fellows would've teased him gently for his admiration of their captain. Alexei didn't care what relationship Schwann had with a dead woman, of course, but that sentiment could irreparably weaken the tool he favored most and had come to trust?

Bad enough that Yeager doted on the two girls he'd adopted, to the detriment of furthering Alexei's agenda for Leviathan's Claw. At least they served as additional leverage on Yeager when Alexei demanded his obedience. Schwann's memories of his life before, should he finally accept them as his, could only prove harmful to Alexei's cause, for they were marked by an idealism Alexei had already discarded as useless. Hope that people can do right if shown how to had no place in the heart of a man whose work relied upon his ability to deceive and murder without qualms.

Seeing the solitary fire lily, well cared for, in a vase on Schwann's nightstand later during a rare and, in this case, orchestrated visit to the Captain's personal quarters substantiated Alexei's doubts. There was something stirring in Schwann's hollow breast that Alexei wouldn't appreciate. Unfortunately, closer observation revealed more cracks in Schwann's perfect facade.

All the speculation about when the Captain took his rest came to an abrupt halt upon the head gardener discovering Schwann asleep in a tree. The elderly man narrowly dodged getting his head lopped off along with a broad swath of the hedges he was trimming. His yelling at who he assumed was some hooligan to climb down out of his prized centuries old willow startled the Captain awake and into casting a scythe of wind at the noise, though thankfully not into falling from his perch. One question about the order's most elusive commander seemingly answered, the rank and file soon occupied themselves with asking others:

Was Captain Schwann always so capable at the magic artes? While not unheard of, given the extensive repertoire of strike and arcane artes Knights were expected to master once finished with the basic weapon forms, few had the opportunity and fortitude to learn magic, too, healing or offensive, unless assigned to those support roles. That the Captain had again exceeded the norm wasn't precisely a huge shock, save for the fact that nobody guessed his skill in magic at all.

(It was he who had permitted Schwann the use of magic artes as a preemptive measure to secure Raven's standing in the guilds, whose members, Alexei knew, often could not depend on dedicated healers or spellcasters as the Knights had and trained accordingly. Now Alexei regretted not taking a direct hand in Schwann's instruction. Whatever amateur mage he'd hired in Dahngrest to teach him, if indeed he sought any formal lessons instead of experimenting blindly himself, must have skimped on the essentials. Schwann had developed the deplorable habit of substituting for a proper magical incantation with a shortened command phrase of his own invention.)

He had never cast any spell in the field or combat drills, much less one powerful enough that the head gardener was still bemoaning the utter ruination of the royal hedge maze. Nor had his name ever been mentioned as among those an enterprising young Knight might curry favor with to seek tutelage in advanced magics. And his wind affinity! Notoriously resistant to control, wind was said to be the element of the fickle and free-spirited, neither of which was a description that suited the Captain.

(Schwann may not have the temperament of a wind mage, but Alexei knew Raven of Altosk did. Even had his distinctive magic not connected Schwann to his guild persona, Alexei would have ordered him to desist from casting the rest of his spells, however helpful they might be. That style was sloppy and far too revealing of the poor quality of the artes schooling the practitioner received—or, as Alexei came to suspect more and more with every wind blade he saw, the sheer lack thereof—for a man of Schwann's reputation and resources to show. Little could be done to hide Schwann's familiarity with the novice spell, which at least he could cast wordlessly, and this Alexei imposed on him.)

The royal gardens were shut away from trespassers in a large sunken courtyard with high walls tucked into the castle's upper levels. How did Captain Schwann even get in? That was an answer the head gardener, who possessed the only key, greatly desired to hear from the Captain. So much so that the man, puffed up with rage at the affront, hounded the Captain whenever he could be found until he at last pointed out that the royal suites had balconies facing the gardens.

Opinion was split on whether Captain Schwann was serious. With no reigning emperor, the royal suites were likewise barred to entry, Prince Ioder and Princess Estellise having chosen to reside nearer the council room and the wing where the Knights were quartered. Some argued that the Captain was a man of hidden talents—his secret missions for the Commandant!—but were at a loss to explain why he would apply those talents here, others that it just wasn't honorable for him to sneak around like a thief in the night and so he hadn't, all evidence to the contrary. The head gardener couldn't believe such an outrageous lie. Especially after being reassured the suite keys had never left the chamberlain's person.

(Entertaining as it was to imagine how the naysayers would change their tune if they knew, as Alexei did, that picking locks and scaling balconies was well within the estimable Captain's purview, the whole episode was a headache for him. The head gardener was too slow and too blind to catch an intruder as practiced at skulduggery as Schwann. Having failed to keep Schwann out a dozen more times since he first disturbed the Captain's sleep, he finally appealed to Alexei for help. It galled Alexei to remind Schwann, of all the inane things, that he needn't nap on a bench or under some bush when he had at his disposal a perfectly acceptable bed in a room of his own, but remind him he did. To no avail, as the lapses continued, and tired of dealing with the complaints, Alexei was forced to grant Schwann a special dispensation to be in the royal gardens.)

Now he watched from behind a pillar upon another balcony as Schwann relieved the Princess Estellise's regular escort to stand guard on her himself. At a respectable distance, Alexei noted, half concealed by a tree and his back turned politely to her so that, unlike her previous minders, he didn't loom over her reading. Irritated, Alexei wondered if Schwann had simply forgotten that, as the royal successor supported by the council, the restrictive protection detail assigned to Lady Estellise was an intentional display of the Knights' power, lest she become more of a puppet to the nobility than she already was.

Quiet as the garden was except for the soft gurgling of a small fountain in the corner, their voices drifted up to Alexei clear enough for him to distinguish words. The Princess, seated on the grass, tried at first to concentrate on the book spread open over her lap. She soon grew too engrossed in staring at the back of Schwann's head to read, however. Closing her book with a determined hitch of her shoulders, she said, "Captain, would you share with me again some tales of your travels?"

Alexei ground his teeth. _Again?_ It seemed there was much these days that Schwann saw fit not to inform him of. Below, Schwann was shaking his head, and for a moment, Alexei thought himself wrong to assume Schwann could be baited from his cold reserve by the Princess's pretty face and sweet voice.

"They would be of no interest to you, Your Highness," Schwann was quick to reply, tone flat, "and I am not skilled at telling them." Yet he made no move to excuse himself from her presence, almost as though he were waiting for her to take the next step in a dance they'd done before. Alexei frowned.

"I beg to differ, Captain," the Princess said firmly, and Alexei could picture the pout that no doubt pursed her lips, the spoiled child. "Personally, I've found them to be quite illuminating. Sir Schwann, you do yourself a disservice." Her bright smile suffused every line of her body as she straightened, hands balling into excited fists, and proclaimed, "You are an excellent storyteller!"

Schwann's stance was rigid and still he refused to face her, but he tilted his head in curt acknowledgment and asked, "What would you hear tell of, Princess?" At her enthusiastic request for "a swashbuckling tale of high seas piracy," Schwann paused, surely as struck by the absurdity as Alexei was. This naive little girl had no notion of what true pirates were like. It was a hard man who was willing to bloody his hands in the name of something so base as his insatiable greed for treasure, adventure, and more plunder.

He couldn't listen to this farce any longer. As he left, Alexei caught the beginning of Schwann's tale: After the legendary Captain Aifread disappeared, pirates in Imperial waters were generally a tame bunch much more inclined to negotiate the surrender of a prize than their fearsome reputation suggested. Provided one was bold enough in the parley, of course, as Madam President Kaufman of the guild Fortune's Market most certainly was, when she swindled the hapless buccaneers who'd foolishly hoped to rob _her_. Lady Estellise giggled at that.

_Kaufman and Aifread!_ The latter was a sore point for Alexei, having escaped the trap he'd so meticulously laid only to vanish with no confirmation of death, and the former a persistent obstacle to his efforts to discredit the Union. Fostering prejudice against guilds was an uphill battle with the impression most Imperial citizens had of their local Fortune's Market vendors being shrewd but fair, altogether friendly and reliable sorts. A grimace twisted his mouth unbidden. What possessed Schwann to speak thusly to the Princess? There _must_ be a reason for his recent caprices.

Yeager's instability Alexei had all but dismissed as the unavoidable side effect of having resuscitated him too late after a messier blastia transplant, given the less than ideal position and severity of his wound compared to Schwann's. But, no, Alexei did not feel it likely that Schwann was suffering from any delayed complications of his blastia. And this made the situation damnably difficult! For the blastia Alexei was confident he could fix, if it were a matter of tweaking the formula, checking it for accumulated errors, or some such repair work. Schwann's mind? A more delicate instrument by far, that he would have to be cautious not to break.

A few minutes' furious pacing in his quarters yielded a conclusion that should've occurred to him much earlier. He'd been wrong to believe Whitehorse acted carelessly in his arrogance when he chose to keep his would-be killer at his side and even bestow upon the man a trusted position in his guild.

Schwann could offer no explanation for why the Don spared his life then beyond Whitehorse's glee at the prospect of fighting him again. While Alexei understood how men of their prominence and ability might want for the thrill of a true challenge, he perceived also a weakness in Whitehorse. A certain desire to present himself as a hero, perhaps, one who would pity a defeated enemy and show mercy. Both of these motives still had merit, but Alexei should not have discounted Schwann's blindness to his own worth nor forgotten the history of the guilds and of Whitehorse personally.

The man who'd led a covert resistance movement into a successful popular uprising against Imperial rule, Whitehorse would not have failed to see Schwann for what he was: a potentially high-ranked source in the Knights, his blastia marking him as above the common run, if his combat prowess hadn't already, that might be turned to inform on his masters in Zaphias with the right incentive. And skilled as Schwann was, Alexei couldn't depend on him to rationally assess any situation that came too close to fulfilling his frustratingly chronic wish to die.

No, Alexei thought, hand clenching on the back of his desk chair, it was he who'd acted carelessly. Wood creaked under his fingers. That Whitehorse dared to so contest his ownership of Schwann was maddening... But prudence was called for here. He released his grip, shaking the stiffness from his arm, and poured himself a generous glass of red wine at his liquor cabinet. Though he may have underestimated Whitehorse's cunning, neither would it serve to overestimate his foe now.

He had eyes in Dahngrest aside from Schwann and Yeager—none so highly placed, of course, and most for the purpose of conveying his orders to one or the other—and he did not doubt that Whitehorse had his own agents in Zaphias, particularly in the lower quarter. Alexei smiled at the smooth roll of the wine in his glass. It took a great deal more effort to insert a spy into the Knights, however, than it did for one to join the guilds, who routinely recruited whatever riffraff blew in off the streets.

Despite the council's criticisms, Alexei's policy was not to induct a rabble of ne'er-do-wells looking to live on the Empire's largess into the Knights unconstrained. The selection process was rigorous, from trials of physical and mental fitness to investigations into the enlistees' stated backgrounds, the last under Khroma's uncompromising supervision. He allowed himself a chuckle at the council's horrified recoil when he proposed extending these requirements to the nobility and age-old custom of sponsored apprentices. Did those reactionary fossils truly imagine he wouldn't be able to divine their little plots to subvert his authority or appoint moles into the Royal Guard?

One additional benefit of his and Khroma's semiannual purge of council plants was that it rendered the existence of any guild spies within the ranks exceedingly unlikely. Whitehorse must surely know that Raven was an Imperial Knight of some standing, but that his right hand man was Alexei's, too? He scoffed. No, only a lunatic would suspect sober and dedicated First Captain Schwann Oltorain of haring off to Dahngrest disguised in purple, pink, and a general air of seediness when he wasn't busy marshaling his brigade or the Royal Guard in the Commandant's stead.

The paper trail of Schwann's secret missions—dangerous solo expeditions to the wilds of Hypionia in search of ancient artifacts and suitable sites for colonization—was impeccable and available for the perusal of a councilman who dug hard enough. And there was an entire contingent of Knights loyal to Alexei ready to claim that for any given period of time Captain Schwann was ordering them about on special field exercises in the vicinity of the capital. Word of which Alexei would have spread after Schwann was gone to Whitehorse's side but never so regularly as to fall into a pattern. He had yet the opportunity, he decided, to bring Schwann back into line without sacrificing all the gains he'd made.

Whitehorse hadn't realized who exactly he had in his grasp. Else he would've tightened his hold and approached Raven with the means to forsake the Empire or, failing that, killed him rather than risk Schwann reporting directly to Alexei. Instead, Whitehorse's efforts to win over Schwann were slow and, though insidious in a way, practically aimless. They seemed to be guided by the notion that appealing to Schwann's buried emotions through Raven's happy lie of a life would eventually break him free of Alexei's bonds. He drained the rest of his wine in one deep draft, resisting the urge to sneer.

First, a test of how much influence Raven's thinking had on Schwann's actions. At least, Alexei corrected himself with a sigh, when it came to matters of greater consequence than what he bought at market, where he chose to sleep, or how he told tall tales to gullible princesses, foolish as all of those were. Then Alexei would judge whether Schwann's infiltration of the guilds had to be abandoned. A few eccentricities he could abide, so long as Schwann did not betray his trust.

A month later, Alexei summoned Schwann to his office for talk of an assassination. "Captain Faulks," he said, paging through the relevant files. "Are you familiar with him?" When Schwann nodded after a brief moment's consideration, Alexei was pleased but not surprised. Schwann had a talent for remembering names, faces, and personal details that belied his reputation among the Knights for reclusiveness; it was one of the traits that made him such an effective spy. "Faulks recently announced his retirement. While I hoped to promote Cumore to his post and the garrison at Heliord, it appears he finds fault with my selection."

Cumore, too, was familiar to Schwann, and he could not hide the slight shift in his expression, the gaze of his visible eye sharpening, from Alexei's close watch. The scion of a minor noble family whose lineage wasn't too many generations removed from being upjumped merchants, Cumore was an entitled little prick who kept it no secret that he despised the opening of knightly ranks to the lowborn. Schwann, by virtue of his fame as a hero of the Great War the most widely recognized as well as the most senior Knight of supposedly common birth serving—save for Alexei himself, whose qualifications Cumore wasn't quite so stupid as to impugn—was a frequent target of Cumore's ire, though tellingly never in Schwann's immediate presence.

Neither were Cumore's deluded ambitions to crown himself commandant exactly a mystery to Alexei. He had nothing to fear in that regard, however. Cumore hadn't won many friends by disparaging the well-liked Schwann or with his comically abysmal performances in the regimental sword drills Alexei mandated even officers must participate in five times a year at minimum. But to raise Heliord as a staging base for future military operations against the Union, Alexei could use a scapegoat to implement less savory policies and speed the city's construction.

So, he continued, "I believe Faulks has the connections on the council to overrule me. That would set an unwelcome precedent of council meddling in troop assignments." They'd had discussions like this before, and Alexei appreciated that unlike Yeager, who required a blatant statement of intent to act upon since becoming head of Leviathan's Claw, Schwann followed his reasoning without being prompted to and simply proceeded to do as he wished, no need for any further incriminating direction. He put down the personnel files and, relaxing into his chair, tapped a finger on another form.

"Faulks is scheduled next week to accompany several of his lieutenants on one last foray beyond the barrier—more a camping trip than the scouting mission he submitted—then plans to repair to his secluded family holdings on an indefinite basis." There were two possibilities for dealing with Faulks, both viable. A fortified estate posed no problem for Schwann, walls no higher than those he climbed into the royal gardens and the premises not as patrolled as the castle.

If Alexei's enemies refused to show their faces outside the grounds of their mansions, they would just have to die in their parlors, their beds, and once at their dining table. With disturbances in the royal quarter under, naturally, the jurisdiction of the Royal Guard, the inquiry into Captain Faulks' murder would inevitably conclude it was the result of a burglary gone wrong and that the perpetrators had, sadly, long escaped the city, leaving no clues as to their identities or whereabouts. He was more practiced at covering Schwann's tracks than the flimsy claims of illness that marred their earliest executions. Faulks' loyal lieutenants, though, could prove to be trouble.

They were as resistant to Cumore's appointment as their captain was, and while they hadn't the rank or pull to dispute it, as any commander soon learned, you couldn't retain control over the men without the support of your subordinate officers. And Cumore was far too spineless to assert his authority in case of mutiny. "What a shame it would be for politics to intrude on his leave," Alexei added after a weighty pause.

As always, Schwann caught on quickly. Only when normally he would nod in silent assent or tell Alexei what he wanted would be done, Schwann glanced away for a heartbeat, the small movement as obvious to Alexei as if he'd flinched. Alexei felt his eyes narrowing. "You have something to say, Captain?" he asked mildly.

_He is at least aware that he erred_, Alexei thought, as Schwann straightened a bit more in his position of attention, shoulders stiff. The clenching of his hand where it rested upon the hilt of his sword betrayed him, but his voice remained toneless. "Captain Faulks has served the Empire faithfully for many years," he said, "and trained his lieutenants to do the same. He..." A creak of armor as his gauntleted grip seized tighter. "He would be glad for some... peace and they..."

Deserve to live? Alexei steepled his fingers and leaned forward over his desk onto his elbows. Though Schwann's gaze had again wandered during the course of his rather ponderous answer, this time receding inwards, his mind snapped back from wherever it went, Schwann blinking like a sleeper startled awake, as Alexei spoke:

"No faithful servant of the Empire would balk at sacrificing his selfish desires for the greater good." Had Schwann been swayed by the sentimentalism cultivated by Whitehorse in Raven? _Or..._ "Cumore at Heliord is essential to my plans." Suddenly, a different explanation presented itself.

In the days following the blastia transplant, Schwann had tried over and over to undo Alexei's work. He clawed at the edges and anchors that joined the blastia to his flesh, ripping his skin into raw strips even when drugged unconscious, and nearly succeeded in killing himself with a spoon a witless nurse had left in his soup bowl despite the removal of every other piece of metal and glass from his room that Alexei had ordered. He'd been keen on wringing that woman's neck with his bare hands after he found Schwann—hardly alive, by the grace of fainting from blood loss before he could finish prying the blastia out of his chest. The madness didn't subside until he gave Schwann a remote to switch the blastia off. Or what he said was the control unit.

What that remote actually controlled Alexei had forgotten, if he ever knew. Probably a ceiling fan in some other room of the hospital. Nobody had yet devised anything like a network that could link multiple blastia cores together or to an independent command tool over a distance, but that hadn't mattered to Schwann. Nor that his blastia didn't so much as flicker regardless of how he pressed the remote's buttons, Alexei recalled. Still, for hours on end, he fiddled with the remote. Turned it ceaselessly in his hands, fingers caressing its sides and thumbing its buttons with a click, click, and a strangled sound that was half a sigh, half a sob.

Alexei stood abruptly, hands planting on his desk with a stinging thump. His fingers curled with the urge to grab Schwann by the arms and shake sense into him. "Remember who you are," he said sharply. When Schwann accepted the uniform of his new role, Alexei had deemed the worst danger safely past. Much as he would've preferred that Schwann not hate his existence and the blastia which ensured it, Alexei was forced to settle for a Schwann who wouldn't actively attempt suicide, apathetic though he was at the prospect of his own demise.

Peace may be what Captain Faulks sought in quitting the Knights, but what Alexei heard in Schwann's words was his yearning for the grave, stronger than it'd been for years. And in his unarticulated desire that Faulks' lieutenants be spared, his crippling regret that he survived where his once comrades hadn't. Why had these feelings resurfaced in Schwann to interfere with his duties now?

"I need you," Alexei said, the same argument he'd used then. "That hasn't changed. Do you mean to cast away all that we have achieved?" Had he tired of being Schwann so badly that he wanted Schwann, too, dead and gone? Alexei's breath hissed out between his teeth. To become Raven in truth? "Who are you?" It was a demand. He might have struck Schwann, if he were nearer, rage flooding his veins.

The reply was swift as he could have hoped: "Schwann Oltorain, First Captain of the Imperial Knights." It didn't satisfy Alexei, however, who scowled at how weary Schwann seemed, a noticeable slump to his shoulders. He closed his eyes, swallowing shallowly, and the shadow upon his face cleared. The stare he met Alexei's with was dull and blank as a sheet of slate. Finally, he said, "I'll take care of it, as you wish," then bowed his head before departing, every step precise.

For minutes afterwards, Alexei could only glare at the door Schwann had so courteously shut behind him. Was he aware of how erratic his behavior had grown? The strange habits, distant and distracted one moment, then as focused as ever, at turns ready to be rid of his life as Schwann and resigned to continue as him. Anger clouded Alexei's thoughts, and he had to restrain himself from sweeping the papers on his desk to the floor in a violent fit of temper.

He collapsed back into his chair, one hand kneading at his temples. Schwann was a ghost of his old dream for the Empire, before the Great War ended so many hopes. Before he saw in a ruinous flash that the rot had spread too deep, impossible to root out until all the world's callous fools—the shortsighted and blundering dross of humanity—were eliminated or cowed by force. Not even with Khroma had he shared that vision, as much as she knew of his plans. Partly because the years had taught him to be wary and partly because he could not risk exposure further tarnishing the future.

Was Schwann unworthy of the trust he'd accorded him then? No, Alexei rejected that idea. He honestly had not expected Schwann to be alive to report to him when he woke days after his surgery and the botched assassination. With him indisposed, Schwann was freed from the itinerary that kept him busy at Alexei's side or in the public eye, on recruiting missions and the traditional pilgrimages, and he might have taken advantage of the lessened watch.

Instead, he organized the search of the rubble that was once headquarters for survivors and evidence of the culprits responsible for the attack, secured the auxiliary barracks, armory, and other potential targets against intruders, ordered a constant guard upon the Commandant and rest of the wounded, pushed through emergency supplies to feed the men, heal them, clothe and house them, and to stave off despair for their lost comrades. The thousands of details required to protect the weakened Knights that Alexei would have implemented himself, Schwann had seen to when he was incapable of doing so and while under no obligation to. Alexei would never forget that.

Perhaps, he'd thought at Schwann's willingness to be his sword in the darkness, he could still achieve all he dreamt of, if there was one who understood him to follow wherever he led. A bitter laugh rose in his throat that he stifled. How naive of him, in the wake of a disastrous reversal and as familiar with the shape of Schwann's demons as he was, to believe that Schwann's resolve to stay the course he charted would always be equal to his.

Yet what could he do to steady Schwann's wavering devotion? Words and arguments he had tried. To little effect, as the most they had accomplished was to temporarily avert Schwann dying by his own hand. And the casual existence that Whitehorse was dangling in Raven's reach like a lure, Alexei could not promise. Schwann was necessarily weighed down by the strictures of the Empire, of the Knights, and his uses in Alexei's struggle to bring both to heel. Could he release Schwann from his debt?

Something in him snarled at the mere suggestion, red in tooth and claw. To let Schwann run to Whitehorse's side, Alexei's blastia in his chest and Alexei's secrets in his head? He couldn't help the peel of his lips back from his teeth, baring a smile that slit his face in two. Alexei would kill Schwann himself rather than allow that.

A week later, Captain Faulks and a number of the young lieutenants in his brigade died tragically on what should have been one last easy mission before his retirement. Zaphias was astir with rumors about how their bodies had been recovered by the search party—mangled by beasts, strewn like flotsam in a clearing of blasted trees not a day's ride from the city—and an impending monster incursion. Had the Lord of the Plains moved hunting grounds? Would food shipments from northern Mayoccia be waylaid? The council clamored for Alexei to address the threat.

Captain Schwann was dispatched to Halure with the Royal Guard, his brigade and two more in support. There he sent forth scouts to confirm the Lord of the Plains remained in its territory northeast of Deidon Hold, though all were under strict orders not to engage. In a show of altruism that marked him again as an exemplary Knight or a deft bit of political theater, depending on whom one asked, Schwann commanded the expedition return to the capital via the Quoi Woods. Monsters were routed, their skins and meat delivered to local farmers, who were reassured and whose produce was then escorted to Zaphias in a convoy that also made safe the most traveled roads. Food by the cartload, triumphant Knights, and freshly slain monsters arrived together at their destination to put the public's fears to rest.

While Alexei could not fault Schwann's handling of the campaign, his suspicions that Schwann was slipping from his grasp went unabated. Schwann had attended Faulks' funeral, looking wan and like he belonged in the closed casket in Faulks' place. The other mourners might have mistaken it for grief, assuming the two captains were well acquainted or maybe that Schwann simply respected Faulks. Alexei knew better.

Faulks and his lieutenants should not have given Schwann much of a fight in their shock at the ambush and who their assailant was. No, if Schwann were injured or had overexerted himself and his blastia, it was he who had likely hesitated and left an opening in his defenses. Each time he unleashed his blastia's stored energy, there was always a risk that it would be the last. Alexei had warned him that the more explosive, the harder it was on his body, to the point of losing consciousness.

Was he disappointed at waking, Alexei wondered sourly, still alive? He kept an eye on Schwann as he and Khroma exchanged pleasantries with the nobility after the service. And he watched Schwann's face pale further and further with every mention of Faulks' lieutenants. How he mentored them from when they were promising recruits, how he would've gladly died so their lives would not be cut short. Finally, Schwann excused himself from the company of a woman who was loudly lamenting how senseless the deaths of those poor boys were, and Alexei pursued him, with a quick word to Khroma.

He didn't wander far. Alexei felt his jaw clench, teeth grinding, at where Schwann had stopped to toe the edge of one of the unfilled graves that awaited the bodies of Faulks' lieutenants, yet to be interred in private ceremonies for their families. "Captain Schwann, are you well?" he said, as he walked up to Schwann's right side near enough to study his face. It was an effort to smooth his voice into something that could pass for concerned with his fingers tensing to grab Schwann by the chin and jerk that deadened eye away from peering into the pit before him as if praying it would swallow him whole. Not at all certain Schwann heard him, Alexei nevertheless added, "Will you be able to travel to Halure and undertake a monster suppression?"

"No matter what he did or how he begged," said Schwann slowly, half whispering to himself, "he could not have saved them." Alexei sucked in a breath, alarmed now, but Schwann continued without a pause. "I'll do as you want. Then..." Flat as his tone was, his features carved from cold stone, it burned Alexei to see a faint spark brightening beneath the gaze Schwann turned on him and know it to be a sign that Schwann had, in the heart he bestowed, begun to betray him. "Should I leave for Dahngrest?"

Treacherous as the depths of a frozen lake thawing, Alexei thought, hidden by a thin, brittle shell of ice. "Yes," he said, the words acrid on his tongue, "I expect Whitehorse will grow impatient at your prolonged absence." Schwann's eye widened a touch. Alexei, in no mood to explain his ill temper to its cause, gritted out, "After Halure, you may go," and stalked back towards the somber gathering, a furious knot twisting in his stomach.

_I have no choice._ Alexei waved off Khroma's curious glance, mind worrying at the problem, as he stepped into her conversation with a few of the council moderates. Schwann was _his_, and he would not surrender his claim to Whitehorse or anybody—_anything_—else. Not even the death Schwann sought so unrelentingly. Harsher measures were needed.

**· · ·**

_TBC_


	2. Around (Around and Around)

Warning for non-graphic sexual abuse and violence, with some suicidal ideation and shades of Stockholm syndrome. Alexei missed the PSA about not molesting and coercing traumatized rape victims. He also cares fuck-all for consent, as expected of the man who resuscitates people against their will by sticking a magic weaponized rock in their chests. Don't do as he does, kids! Please read responsibly!

* * *

**· · ·**

**Allora, Magari**

_Around (Around and Around)_

**· · ·**

Alexei thought long and hard on how to correct Schwann's behavior. First, he decided, he needed to separate this Raven character from Schwann and make it inescapably clear to him that while he was in Zaphias, the uniform of the Imperial Knights, or Alexei's presence, he was Schwann and only Schwann. Though Alexei could do nothing about Don Whitehorse's lax leash on _his_ man, which had gotten Schwann so comfortable in Raven's skin, he could remind Raven that his days were numbered and his guild loyalties to be discarded at Alexei's command. Perhaps then he might give Schwann a reason to _want_ again. Something meaningless that wouldn't threaten his plans or Schwann's place in them.

The former was a simple problem to solve, Alexei felt. He had learned that violence was a persuasive argument where other methods failed, and it would certainly serve him well here, to impress upon Raven that the Empire's hand—Alexei's hand—could always reach him, despite Whitehorse's protection and his cozy little lie of a life in Dahngrest.

When it came to the second, however, Alexei could only hope inspiration struck him once Schwann was made vulnerable and open to suggestion. He'd been trying to reinstill in Schwann some will to live for years now, with the barest modicum of success. Schwann's irrational resistance to his attempts to save the man was... frustrating. Alexei didn't know what it would take to finally break through to him, and he despised his ignorance.

So, Alexei had no choice but to proceed with this scheme of his half incomplete. He started by looking to the Royal Guard for the necessary tools. Amongst the sons and daughters of the nobility advanced into the Commandant's service this past year was a company of wastrels whose conduct Alexei had deemed unbecoming. The Royal Guard was no sinecure for those seeking rank or power enough to lord over others. Devotion to him and his cause was expected, as well as a high standard of training, and that was maintained by weeding out both the unduly ambitious and the small-minded sycophants.

This particular group liked to frequent a tavern, the Spica, in one of the more disreputable areas of the lower quarter when off-duty but still in uniform, the idiots. Each time resulted in a slew of civilian complaints about Knights being drunk and disorderly that would inevitably find their way across Alexei's desk. Accused of all manner of petty crime, from debts owed to public indecency, their files thick with demerits and punishment details, these men were bound for dishonorable discharges.

But what interested Alexei was their personal histories. Three were brothers whose father had died in service during the guild uprising six years ago; another had lost his own brother in the same conflict. Alexei perused Khroma's supplementary records. One was the subject of a minor scandal when his affianced wife jilted him to wed a guildsman of no name, and the families of the rest held financial assets in Tolbyccia that had depreciated with the expansion of guild influence to Capua Torim. All were members of a radical political faction that advocated for higher tariffs, stricter border control, even a resumption of hostilities with the Union before it grew too powerful.

Here was a hatred Alexei could use. Such men could be goaded to violence. And barring the vendors of Fortune's Market, guildsmen were not so common in Zaphias that one would go unseen in the lower quarter, especially if he acted suspiciously or intruded on spaces the locals had claimed as theirs. Now to prepare the stage for scene and players.

Alexei compared the duty roster to the litany of complaints—assigned to the noon patrol, with evening drill, they must have begun a tradition of supping late at a tavern—and jotted down a tally of which members of the company went drinking on which nights over the course of several weeks. There was a core group of four who were regular patrons at the Spica, joined by two more when drill was cut short and their healer on festival days only. He tapped his quill on the paper, ink blotting. The timing would work. Recalling Schwann from Dahngrest was always accompanied by at least a week's travel delay.

In that period, he could mandate extra drill, resentment easier to foster in tired men. A sham mission to decoy Schwann to the right place at the right hour and... Well, he would have to judge the situation as it developed. His involvement should ideally remain obscure, the event believed to be a chance encounter by the participants, but a precaution was needed against Schwann slipping the trap he set. Alexei smiled tightly. Schwann had a weakness he alone could exploit.

When all was in readiness, he had one of his agents in Dahngrest send word to Schwann of a courier mission he was to complete prior to reporting to Alexei upon his return to Zaphias. The rendezvous was set late in the evening outside the Spica, where the uniform of the Imperial Knights would be far too conspicuous for the wearer to loiter in while awaiting a contact. Schwann was certain to come as Raven, and the three-day interval for the meeting would ensure he caught the eye of Alexei's pawns, should they miss each other the first night or the second. Alexei rented an upstairs room at the inn across the street with an unobstructed view and made arrangements to leave the castle via a secret passageway, dressed plainly and cloaked.

The first night, Schwann perched himself on a stack of crates to watch both the tavern and the street, seemingly idly as he munched on a handful of skewers. Alexei saw him take note of the Knights as they exited the Spica, the four men loud in their drunken revelry and the red of the Royal Guard, but Schwann disregarded them after a couple minutes' study, none of them fitting the false description he'd been given.

He didn't notice that one of the group had marked him. Middle-aged and ill-favored with a puffed up air of superiority, the man turned to stare fixedly at Schwann as he and his companions rounded a corner. That one would be the instigator, thought Alexei.

Schwann tarried until well past midnight, then ran a hand over his face and retired, Alexei assumed, to temporary lodgings. The second night, Alexei's pawns didn't show, either on patrol or more likely carousing at a different establishment. He wasn't concerned. They would be back at the Spica tomorrow, as was their custom from the complaints logged.

Finally, on the third night, they confronted Schwann. The leader glowered darkly at the sight of Schwann and waved his friends nearer into a conspiratorial knot. Alexei stood from his seat at the room's table, the cup of tea that was his one concession to comfort left to cool unattended, and moved closer to the window as below the four men advanced on Schwann. Their circling paths, like a pack of wolves stalking unwary prey, their stances tense with anticipation—Schwann could not have failed to detect the threat.

Captain Schwann might have straightened to his full height, hand on the hilt of his sword in warning; Raven slouched a little more insouciantly and raised his hands in mock surrender, face plastered with a deflecting smile. The leader didn't take Schwann's act kindly. Smiling tightly himself, Alexei keyed up the command program on the remote control to Schwann's blastia. Grabbing him by a meaty fist in his shirt collar, the man jerked Schwann to his feet and with the help of the others pushed him against the wall at the mouth of the alley next to the tavern.

Alexei could determine the exact moment Schwann decided he had suffered enough of these fools. He relaxed further, limbs loose even as the men jostled him more roughly, and rolled his weight to the balls of his feet for speed and evasion. His knife he wouldn't draw. City ordinances restricted the civilian use of edged weapons within the barrier to justifiable cases of self-defense. A guildsman, lacking Imperial citizenship, would find it difficult to successfully indict the Royal Guard in the hidebound civil courts of Zaphias, the military tribunal a worse prospect, and Schwann knew Alexei would not countenance the exposure of any formal arraignment.

No, magic was Schwann's only option. A reduced wind blade to knock back his attackers and allow him an escape. That wouldn't do, of course. Alexei transmitted the code he had written weeks ago. The string should cause the blastia's power to cycle, to no long term effect, but if he were correct in his calculations, Schwann would feel the interruption as a sudden drain on his energies, ending with the shock of reconnection.

Barely had the traces of his spell's glyphs appeared before it dissipated harmlessly. Schwann collapsed onto his knees, clutching at his chest. Ignorant as they were, Schwann's attackers were yet Knights and realized, with a growing anger that was all too clear in the snarls contorting their faces, that he had tried to cast _something_. They were not slow to seize the advantage Alexei had provided them either.

One drove the breath out of Schwann with a swift kick to the gut, Schwann curling reflexively to protect his vitals. Then the leader stepped in to force him to the ground with a knee rammed into his back, his left arm yanked behind him at an angle that must have pulled from him a noise. Another weaselly man knelt hastily and clapped a hand to Schwann's mouth, fingers buried in his hair to turn his head; the youngest, a gangling boy, glanced furtively about the street, body poised to flee. Alexei narrowed his eyes. His plans could unravel here, if his pawns proved less prejudiced or more craven than he guessed. But, no, the leader leaned down to speak in Schwann's ear, an ugly smirk stretching his lips, and with a wrench on Schwann's arm that had him buckling in pain, dragged Schwann by the neck into the alley away from any witnesses, nodding for the rest to follow.

There was nothing to do now except wait. Alexei sipped his cold tea, not tasting it. Schwann had scrabbled one-handed at his throat, trying to pry open the man's grip, with an almost panicked desperation. Futile, Alexei thought, his body so uncoordinated in the wake of the blastia reset that he couldn't gain his feet, legs thrashing upon the ground.

Possibly it was all he could do to stumble after his attacker and keep himself from choking. Did he fear his artificial heart would stop? What did that idiot man say to him? They were petty bullies, drunken sots besides, and Alexei judged them incapable of rank murder. He spun his empty cup gently in his hands.

Its exterior was painted with a pair of swimming carp, the whole glazed a delicate turquoise; there was a large chip in its enameled rim. The color, shading to blue in the darkness of the room, was... striking. A pity it was marred. Time crawled forwards, every breath hanging heavy as an anchor on his awareness. Alexei was reminded of the months Schwann was presumed dead in an attempt to kill Whitehorse. He placed the teacup on its saucer with a juddering clink.

His first hint that things had not gone as planned was when the four men reappeared on the street. The thickset leader, face florid with more than drink, was adjusting his belt and had his arm slung around the shoulders of the youngest, who looked pale and unnerved, gaze darting back towards the alley. Alexei frowned. The other two, as well, seemed far too satisfied with themselves; theirs was not the boastful strut of men who were still riding high on the adrenaline of a fistfight won or at least not entirely, a languid looseness to their limbs. Slats of light from the tavern windows as they passed fell upon half-lidded eyes and smiles like a cat that had gotten into the cream.

As he waited and the minutes lengthened into an hour, then two with no sign of Schwann, Alexei's suspicions hardened into certainty. Schwann was foolish to the point of recklessness when it came to injury. Not that he wasn't one of the canniest fighters trained by the Knights, able to defend against multiple attackers, but that after a battle he would mulishly haul himself to his quarters or a safe boarding house with no more healing than gels and the little magic he knew could provide, no matter how serious his wounds. Alexei didn't learn of his discovery that he could overload his blastia and the near successful assassination attempt that spurred it until he reported the deaths of ex-councilman Fialen and Yeager's men the next day, limping into Alexei's office for his routine debriefing on Whitehorse's activities.

No normal injury would keep Schwann from retreating to a secure location, before fainting and leaving himself vulnerable. Alexei gritted his teeth. His blood pounded in his ears as he went downstairs, paid the inn manager, and crossed the street to the alley, the hood of his cloak drawn close and skirting the pools of light beneath the streetlamps, thankfully not as numerous as in the royal quarter.

Midnight was fast approaching. There were few passersby, save the drunken stragglers being ejected from the bars as they shut their doors and who paid Alexei no mind, tripping over their own feet. That should make it easier to aid Schwann, he thought. And Schwann would need his help, if he were right about what those _cretins_ had done to him.

The alley was littered with refuse, smashed bottles and rotting trash that Alexei eyed with distaste. For once, he was grateful Schwann's choice of clothing as Raven was so bright and outlandish. Even in the gloom and huddled as small as he was against a flyer-plastered wall at the end of the alley, Schwann couldn't be missed. He flinched when Alexei crouched down in front of him. The reek of wine and sex was strong, clinging to him. His left hand lay unmoving on the ground at his side despite the shivers racking his body.

So, the arm had been pulled out of joint, and the longer it stayed that way, the greater the risk of permanent damage. Alexei reached for Schwann's shoulder. Only to pause in surprise at the sight of his own hands clenched white-knuckled into fists, nails digging into his palms with a slight sting he hadn't noticed. The aborted gesture caught Schwann's attention. He jerked, trying to shy from Alexei, though there was no recognition in his wild-eyed stare, and moaned high and wavering. "Please," he begged, voice a thready rasp, "Please, p-please..."

"Captain Schwann," Alexei said, mouth dry, "I mean you no harm. Your shoulder must be set, and for that I must touch you." Schwann couldn't hear him. He sighed, having expected no better. Determined, Alexei probed the joint with his fingers, pinning Schwann with his weight as he struggled weakly, his pleas broken by hitching sobs. As soon as he felt sure he could realign the joint, Alexei grabbed hold of Schwann's arm with one hand and rotated it carefully around the shoulder, ignoring how Schwann's face twisted in pain, the tracks of tears wet on his cheeks, and finally his low, hoarse scream as Alexei forced his bones back into place. All the tension fled Schwann's body in an instant, to lodge in Alexei's, a stone grinding against his ribs from within as his breathing sawed at his lungs. Sweat beaded on his forehead, prickling cold in the night air. Schwann was unconscious.

Quashing both the violent urge to slump in relief and to pursue Schwann's attackers, by now gone to the barracks, Alexei checked for other injuries. He found no give where there shouldn't be any and no swelling in the flesh that might indicate hidden bleeding; under his shirt, the smooth surfaces of Schwann's blastia seemed intact, the light in the alley too dim for a closer examination. Schwann's face was caked in blood and—Alexei grimaced—seed, that he rubbed at with his handkerchief, cursing quietly that he had not the prescience to bring a canteen of water. Ringing Schwann's neck and wrists were the darker shadows of bruises. He had not wanted this.

But there was no use in regretting what couldn't be changed. Alexei discarded his soiled handkerchief and raked his fingers, disconcertingly unsteady, through his hair. He had to return with Schwann to the castle before sunrise. A strange hesitation slowing him, Alexei took Schwann into his arms, picking him up, and started the long trek back.

It was more conspicuous, Schwann's head lolling on his chest, and more tiring than simply hoisting Schwann over his shoulder or letting him sag against his side, feet clumsy, like just another couple of drunks staggering home. Either of those could worsen Schwann's injuries beyond Khroma's ability to heal them, however, and a visit to the medical ward that would be noted in public records was a complication Alexei didn't wish to add to this... fiasco.

He stopped often to rest, sitting on city benches with Schwann laid cautiously out next to him. Schwann did not wake. In the lamplight, the bruises mottling his face around his eye and across his cheek were starker. Red stained Alexei's cloak from some sluggishly bleeding cut in his hair; shallow gashes on his palms and rips in the knees of his trousers pointed at scraping contact with the alley's glass shards. They had shoved him to the ground. A footprint, the edge of a standard issue armored boot, was pressed into the skin on the back of one hand. In hindsight, it was a mistake to rely on the behavior of inebriated men. _Idiots!_

Among the complaints received by the commandant's office about this group of Knights were, Alexei remembered belatedly, charges of harassment. He should have foreseen that their predilection for—how did one irate innkeeper phrase it?—treating the female waitstaff as if they were in a brothel might intersect with their hatred of the guilds to endanger Schwann past acceptable limits. His plans for Schwann needed to be revised. To be salvaged, in truth.

Yet he couldn't focus on anything except the man himself, wrists folded limply on his stomach within the circle of Alexei's aching arms. Each stutter of breath was matched by a pause in Alexei's steps as he waited for Schwann to regain consciousness, tongue tangled in the words of an explanation he had less time to rehearse than he hoped. Schwann did not wake. Instead, he turned his face into the coarse fabric of Alexei's cloak with soft whimpers of pain, brow creasing. A band of steel tightened over Alexei's chest. He hurried to the nondescript park in the public quarter where an empress of old had constructed a secret passageway to the castle for the purpose of calling on her commoner paramour.

The park was deserted at this hour. No one witnessed Alexei tapping a sequence of birds and bees carved into the base of Astarte's statue in the rose garden—Her Imperial Majesty had been a bit of a bookish romantic who also fancied herself a humorist—or the plinth splitting apart to reveal a sloping tunnel, ancient blastia torches flickering to life. They wouldn't remain lit for long, the ones nearest the entrance already dimming as Alexei walked by, carrying Schwann. The feeling that the darkness nipped at his heels, silently chasing them, was stifling. He had never been happier to see a vacant room, pushing the wall cabinet back into place in front of the exit.

Under dust covers against one wall was a dining table and set of chairs. This was the empress's small banquet hall, for hosting luncheons and society teas, though the decorative flatware had been cleared from the cabinets and much of the furniture. After orientating himself and unlocking the door, Alexei knelt to look over Schwann where he had lowered him to the floor, fingers seeking a pulse on the vulnerable line of Schwann's throat. His stillness was too perfect for Alexei's comfort. Schwann did not wake. Groaning, Alexei stretched his sore back and arms in preparation for one final effort.

It was awkward maneuvering through the door with Schwann, but Alexei scowled and managed with a minimum of noise. Dodging the security patrols from the uninhabited royal suites to the wing where the Knights were housed was easier, his familiarity with the guard rotations serving him well and his room secluded from the barracks and busier common areas out of respect for his rank. Another few moments of fumbling to reach and use his key, and at last he was able to release Schwann's weight onto the closest couch in the safety of his personal quarters. He shed his cloak onto an armchair, dialed the ceiling light just high enough to see by without risk of being blinded, and shut the door.

For a brief while, he stood there at the door. The desire to lean upon the polished wood and never have to think about how to get Schwann the aid he needed, what to tell him when he came to, as he must, so his loyalty might survive whole, if battered, or about any other problem of the many that had arisen this night was almost overwhelming. Alexei shook his head sharply. He had not achieved all he did or all that he _would_ by sparing himself from harsh, unpalatable realities.

Lips pursed, he assessed what had to be done. First, he pulled the cord dangling from the ceiling to one side of his bed, hidden by headboard and canopy. It connected to a bell in the nearest guardroom and would summon the active duty officer on watch at all hours, usually to deliver messages for him or run other errands. Then, quickly and efficiently, he set about removing Schwann's dirtied clothes: dagger, on the table with the belt wound around its ornate, tasseled hilt; the garish purple robe and _pink_ buttoned shirt he favored as Raven, for some inexplicable reason; worn short boots and the loose black trousers of a style not common to the Empire. Pointless as it would be to pretend at modesty at this juncture, Alexei was still glad for the thin, knee-length pants Schwann had on underneath.

Schwann did not wake. Not even when Alexei jostled his ribs and arm, though a murmur of pain escaped his lips that Alexei hushed with a hand upon Schwann's brow, surprising himself. _Do I pity him_, he wondered as he went to his private bathroom, _or regret that I miscalculated?_ There he discarded Schwann's clothes in his empty laundry hamper, to be properly disposed of later, and wet a small towel in the sink. Returning, he gently cleaned Schwann's face and neck, his hair, and his hands. It was fortunate that those cretins were too drunk to undress him enough for his blastia to show.

A brisk knock sounded at the door. "In a moment," Alexei said, tossing the soiled towel atop the pile of Schwann's clothes. He slid his arms around Schwann's back and under his knees to pick him up again, then carried him to the bed, laying him down on the blankets. Only afterwards did Alexei answer the door, opening it partway to see a watch officer who was just beginning to look nervous at the delay. To the man's credit, he straightened immediately and gave his commandant a smart salute, eyes not straying from Alexei's face.

"Tell Khroma to report to me in my quarters," he commanded, shutting the door unceremoniously on the burly Knight's rather startled _yessir_. A few minutes passed in grim contemplation of the bruises darkening on Schwann's jaw, his throat, and the way even in the low lighting they couldn't possibly be mistaken as anything but fingermarks, before Alexei realized how his order might be misconstrued: an invitation for his female aide to join him, alone, so late at night.

Of course, Alexei soon dismissed the thought with a snort. Let people gossip! Half the Knights already believed Khroma was his lover, and it hadn't damaged their professional relationship at all. Khroma was a steel trap of a woman who didn't care in the least about her repute. Alexei suspected that it amused her, behind her aloof mask, to use the rumors of her liaison with him to deter her potential suitors. He frowned. What her reaction would be to finding Captain Schwann in his bed and in such a state, however, was another matter entirely. She knew better than to question his dealings with Schwann, he hoped.

For the rest, he would have to trust in her natural discretion. It was one of the qualities he'd appointed her for, in addition to her ruthless competence. Still, best that Khroma not find him looming at Schwann's bedside. Do not _fret_, he chided himself. Plans go awry, and this would not be the first of his to do so or even the first time he stood to lose a valuable, irreplaceable tool in Schwann. Except it was not Whitehorse or Schwann himself at fault here.

With a grunt, Alexei strode to his desk, switched on the blastia light next to it, and sat, taking out a sheaf of blank papers from a drawer. He had originally intended to serve Schwann's attackers mere dishonorable discharges from the Royal Guard and without any mention of this last deed in the long string of trouble they'd caused, to avoid compromising Schwann. The idiots would've been packed home—some town south of Zaphias, as Alexei recalled—in disgrace to languish their petty lives away in obscurity, if not poverty.

Now, well, that seemed far too kind a fate for them. Worse than entitled brats, they'd proved themselves brutes and brainless ones at that. The majority of the Knights stationed at the castle should recognize Raven in passing as a guildsman of some import, given his meetings with the Commandant. By the familiarity with which they targeted Schwann outside the tavern, these idiots couldn't claim ignorance in this regard. Did they imagine there would be no repercussions to harming the Don's emissary? That Alexei would not hear of it or discover those responsible?

It would've been different had they restrained themselves to a beating that could be sanitized for official accounts as just another bar brawl in the lower quarter, typical of evenings when drink flowed too freely and tempers ran too high. But, no, they had to satisfy their lust for power in the most ruinous way conceivable, short of murder. A loud crinkle of paper drew Alexei's glare down. He forcibly relaxed his hand, breathed deeply, and smoothed the remaining sheets, flicking the one he'd crumpled off to the side.

Unwise as it would be to allow Whitehorse to learn of this fiasco, Alexei was tempted to deliver the offenders to guild justice. An alliance of outcasts bound by little more than their word, the guilds punished breaches of honor severely. He closed his eyes and massaged his temples irritably, a headache building there. No, he couldn't afford to hand Whitehorse such leverage. Despite Schwann's reports that the Don cared only for Dahngrest's prosperity, Alexei wasn't convinced Whitehorse would hesitate to turn any provocation into a war against the Empire. One day, he'd be ready to fight that battle, but not for years.

So, Raven must keep his silence, and Schwann could never acknowledge that anything happened at all, since to him nothing had. None of which pleased Alexei. Not that he was incapable of disciplining his men for their true crime as Whitehorse might have been willing to do in his place, nor that Schwann need suffer a very personal humiliation he may come to resent Alexei for, though the end of reminding him not to grow too comfortable as Raven had been accomplished.

"Commandant?" As was her wont, Khroma had let herself in, slipping quietly through the door to stand a few paces in with her hands folded demurely before her and an inquisitive tilt to her head. Alexei glanced at her briefly over his shoulder, then purposefully neatened his stack of still blank papers, tapping their edges straight on his desk.

"Tend to Captain Schwann," he said. Until Schwann woke, it was fruitless to speculate about how any of this would affect him or what steps Alexei could take in spite of it all to ensure his loyalty. Decided, Alexei grabbed his quill and dipped it in ink, absently scraping the nib clean. There was one thing he could do, as some measure of recompense.

Khroma's footfalls, always light, were indiscernible on his richly carpeted floor, but Alexei could tell when she reached the bed by her quick intake of air. "How did Captain Schwann come by these injuries?" she asked, her voice level and, to Alexei's ears, several degrees cooler than her norm. "Is this... Is all of this your doing?" _The blastia!_ He cursed inwardly. In his haste to garner aid, he'd forgotten that Khroma was not privy to the secret of Schwann's heart.

Yet he refused to surrender his composure. Alexei began deliberately penning the rote formalities that prefaced a special order to one of his garrison commanders, even as his mind raced through the consequences of his oversight. "Think on how to heal him of his injuries," he warned her, "and not on how he received them. That is none of your concern." Khroma's stare was so hard and pointed that Alexei felt it like the jab of a spear between his shoulders. In answer, he steeled his tone and honed it to a razor's edge. "Do you understand me, Khroma?"

A long pause. His quill scratched to a stop. Just when Alexei was about to turn and attempt an explanation, Khroma said, "Perfectly, Commandant." The words were crisp and icy as the Blade Drifts of Zopheir in winter. For the moment, he had no good excuse to offer her; she seemed to sense as much and cut him off before he tried.

With a curt statement that she needed supplies, Khroma left, not bothering to seek his permission. She wasn't so uncouth as to slam the door on her way out, but the firm snick she shut it with somehow managed to sound condemning nonetheless. How utterly unlike him, to miss such an important detail! Headache fully formed now, Alexei kneaded at his closed eyes with the heels of his hands until bursts of white chased each other across his vision.

Glasses rattling jarred him from his stupor, and he was disconcerted to see Khroma, barely gone, re-enter with a tray propped on her hip. While he lost track of time on occasion when researching, he was not usually so unaware of his surroundings, the battle-trained instincts of a field commander slow to leave him. He glared down at his half-written instructions to Cumore. The night's events must have tired him more than he realized.

Try as he did to concentrate on his self-appointed task, the soft rasp of cloth and clink of bottles as Khroma sorted her bandages and potions proved nigh impossible to ignore. He was certain Schwann's ribs were bruised, not broken, and neither was his nose, bloodied as it had been, his shoulder and the delicate bones of his hand also whole under Alexei's probing fingers. But Alexei was no healer. "Commandant," came Khroma's voice from the bed, "if I may have your assistance?" He threw his quill aside, ink splattering on the letter he would recopy for his records in any case, and went.

"Keep him upright," she ordered, a roll of bandages in one hand. Alexei supported Schwann's still unconscious weight with a hand spread between his shoulder blades as Khroma bound his ribs, winding the stiff gauze around his chest and over his left arm. Some of the swelling ringing his eye was already receding, Alexei thought, the smell of Khroma's salves pungent and slightly floral. He brushed Schwann's hair behind his ear and tipped his face up for a better look at the bruises on his cheek.

Satisfied, Alexei straightened, a bit of ointment lingering warm and creamy on the pads of his fingers. "Khroma," he said, "the blastia is an artifact of the Great War. An experimental model that was never completed nor meant to be used in this fashion." The only indication she gave that she heard him was a break in the steady rhythm of her bandaging. "It saved his life." Little as Schwann valued it, this miracle that out of the hundreds dead at Temza had successfully taken root in him and Yeager alone.

Each failure, convulsing in renewed death throes upon the operating table, had nearly convinced Alexei to call a halt to it all, the civilian doctor having long made it clear to him that she would've stopped performing the surgeries were it not for his sword at her back, his threat against her family. He watched Schwann breathe for a moment. "But I won't have him paraded to more scrutiny than he must suffer," he continued, tone hardening, "a freak or a specimen to be dissected and studied."

This time he waited for Khroma to raise her head; her hands paused as he caught her gaze. She nodded, eyes widening. And so Hermes's work would remain safely a secret. "As for his other injuries," Alexei said, sighing, "Captain Schwann sustained them in the course of a mission for me, the details of which are... sensitive." Finishing, Khroma neatly rolled up her small medical kit and began gathering the extra bandages.

Alexei lowered Schwann gingerly to the bed and tugged the blankets out from under him. Once he had Schwann tucked in as comfortably as could be expected, his hair fanned dark across Alexei's pillow, he turned to find Khroma examining him with an expression he didn't trust yet couldn't quite decipher. Resisting the sudden urge to cough, he told her, "You're dismissed," then seated himself at his desk again, busying his hands with cleaning up the mess he'd left.

Still, Khroma refused to depart until she had rearranged her potions on the table next to Schwann's dagger and instructed him, "Have him drink water and a sleeping tonic when he wakes, a pain reliever if he needs it; the bottles are marked. He should rest undisturbed for the night." The sound of a smile in her voice irritated him. He could imagine which smile it was, too. The enigmatic one he despised that hinted at some hidden knowledge. Alexei grunted, not bothering to thank her as she withdrew with one last—_smug_, he added uncharitably—"Commandant."

Pushing the oddities of Khroma's character from his mind, he resumed drafting his orders to Cumore. Who was about as poor of a city administrator as he was a captain of the Knights, no matter how many texts on infrastructure and urban planning Alexei advised him to read. He snorted. Heliord would likely have collapsed into rubble under his guidance were it not for the team of competent engineers Alexei assigned him. Though he might have Yeager offer Cumore a partnership to help curb the worst excesses.

Cumore's one saving grace was his conniving cruelty, however. Deluded into believing Heliord was his path to the commandant's office, he drove his workers mercilessly, devising an impressive array of subtle threats and half-truths to motivate them. His brigade also served as a convenient dumping ground for men of a similar bent to him, too malicious or hamfisted to be delegated other duties.

If allowed free rein, Cumore was as wasteful of his soldiers' lives as he was with the contents of Heliord's treasury. Alexei had rebuked him against it, the Empire's supply of neither gald nor trained Knights bottomless. To limited effect in the case of the men, Cumore's thin veneer of nobility apparently lending him a greater appreciation for financial sense than the welfare of peasants.

But now Alexei hoped to use the high casualty rate of Cumore's troops to his advantage. Smiling, he authorized the transfer of Schwann's attackers from the Royal Guard to the garrison at Heliord, informing Cumore in not so many words that this was a punishment and permitting him to dispose of them as he wished. Even Cumore could not be so stupid as to misunderstand.

There were two or three men remaining in that squad who couldn't be implicated in any crime. Alexei would have preferred to be rid of them all in one sweep, lest the perpetrators stumble upon an opportunity to boast about their... fun before they were exiled to the monster-infested frontier of Tolbyccia for it. Full unit transfers typically involved an official statement of cause filed with the council and a week's notice at minimum to the individuals in question, both of which Alexei would much rather avoid. Perhaps he could attach them to his personal guard, where he had more leeway in disciplinary actions...

He was aware of it the instant Schwann woke. Behind him, there was a sharp hiss of breath and the sound of blankets rustling. Probably as the fool man jerked up into a sitting position heedless of his injuries. Alexei dropped his quill in its inkwell with a sigh, then stood and turned to find, as expected, Schwann hunched over his bruised ribs, an arm wrapped protectively around his stomach and his other hand fisted in the sheets, shaking with pain. How reminiscent of when he first awoke after the blastia operation, Alexei thought.

While not a flawless process, he'd made Schwann anew once. This was his chance to correct some of those failings and bind Schwann all the tighter to him. "Captain Schwann, are you well?" he asked, clearing his throat to announce his presence. He kept his tone gentle and soothing; Schwann's undoubtedly fragile mental state required careful handling. As it was, Schwann gave no indication that he heard Alexei.

So, stepping closer alongside his own bed, Alexei said, "Captain Schwann, it's me," and let his hand fall lightly onto Schwann's bare shoulder. The effect was marked and immediate. Schwann's skin was chilled under Alexei's palm, muscles tensing. He twitched away with a soft gasp.

Fascinated, Alexei studied Schwann intently. How he shuddered, head bowed so his face was hidden by his hair. It was predictable that this soon after his... experience with those crass idiots, Schwann would not want another's hand upon him, but less so was the fact that, for the briefest moment, Alexei was certain Schwann had leaned _into_ his touch.

"Captain Schwann," he said again, "can you hear me?" This time, a pause, followed by a small nod. Alexei had a hypothesis to test. "Do you remember what happened?" He bent forward a bit, surprisingly eager, the better to observe any changes in Schwann's expression.

A much longer hesitation, then Schwann shook his head minutely. Alexei caught sight of the hollowness in his eyes before he squeezed them shut, something of Schwann or maybe Raven lost in the deep dark that dwelt within. "Well, no matter," Alexei was quick to reassure him. Schwann gnawed at his already bitten raw lip and swallowed wetly. "You are safe in my care now."

When Alexei rested a hand on the crown of Schwann's head, it was unmistakable the way he pressed further into the contact, strands of his hair sliding between Alexei's fingers, even as he trembled with what Alexei guessed was his body's revulsion at the intimacy of the act. _Interesting..._ He considered this strange development as he stroked idly through Schwann's hair. The shivers plaguing Schwann grew more violent, until Alexei moved his hand to cradle the nape of Schwann's neck.

Schwann froze, all the fight, if that was what it was, deserting him abruptly, though the muffled noises trapped in his throat continued to try and break free. Alexei licked his dry lips. It was stimulating, he could not deny, to watch his normally stoic First Captain respond so wholly and instinctively to his every gesture.

It seemed obvious to him now that a part of Schwann needed comfort. Craved a kind touch so desperately, indeed, that he was willing to suffer for it without asking why, his memory suppressed and his defenses stripped to an almost animal wariness that Alexei was confident he could disarm. None alive knew of Schwann's blastia heart prior to tonight, save for him and Whitehorse. Alexei had ensured as much, until he erred with Khroma, and he assumed Whitehorse understood the importance of secrecy in this affair as well as he.

Little wonder that Schwann couldn't bridge the distance from being acquaintances with anyone else to truly being bedfellows, his double life adding another set of complications. Alexei only wondered that he hadn't realized this vulnerability of Schwann's earlier. Whatever liberties Whitehorse afforded Raven, Alexei scoffed inwardly at the notion of the Don showing his enforcer physical affection beyond the occasional hearty slap on the back; a more demonstrative display would likely offend the guilds' antiquated sense of masculinity.

If it was touch Schwann wanted, open and tender, Alexei could provide. What a cheap price, far less than he feared, for the tool he hoped to keep his. He would brand his touch upon Schwann's flesh and receive in turn the blind worship of an addict or, he supposed, a lover.

That thought was so startling Alexei hardly paid attention as he sat on the bed, his body acting without further direction from his mind. _Why would I ever allow this new relationship with Schwann to become sexual?_ He braced a hand against Schwann's back, another on his arm, to urge him wordlessly to lie down again.

Naked and warm, the ridge of Schwann's spine was queerly absorbing in the symmetry of its knobby protuberances, the breadth of his shoulders winging out and arching like the curve of a bow, drawn then unstrung, as his hunger for Alexei's touch battled his forgotten trauma. Glowing through the bandages binding Schwann's ribs was the blastia. A marvelous example of his work and Hermes's, Alexei had always seen it as beautiful, but his sudden impulse to trace the anchor points splayed across Schwann's chest was alien.

Once he got Schwann settled comfortably, Alexei forced his gaze away and walked to the table where Khroma had left a glass, a pitcher of water, and her selection of potions. He put himself to the task of mixing an effective pain reducer and sleeping tonic that wouldn't render Schwann helplessly ill later. Except try as he did to dismiss the idea as a distraction, he found his eyes drifting to his bed, his rumpled sheets, and the figure curled in his blankets. _How long since I took anybody to bed?_ Never had he imagined that it might be Schwann. Was this truly what he desired?

Alexei was no stranger to carnal pleasures, having indulged such pastimes in his youth, yet they held no particular attraction for him even then, paling in comparison to his ambitions. The fluttering, swooning feeling of a budding romance, the yearning for an absent lover's company, the joyous meeting of two souls that transcended the body—he had no experience of them. Had in fact deemed them at best somewhat distasteful in the women and the few men he dallied with, if not outright annoyances, inconveniently persistent after his physical needs were satisfied. It wasn't a hardship to eschew intimate relations when he achieved the rank of commandant. Meaningless as they were, the weak lusts of his body infrequent and easily mastered.

Bedding Schwann would not be so simple. It would be dangerous, Alexei reluctantly admitted to himself. He returned to Schwann with filled glass in hand, all the while very conscious of the shadowed eyes that tracked him. The risk of compromising his asset at Whitehorse's right hand aside, this Schwann was too emotionally unstable; there was no telling how he would react when he learned Alexei couldn't reciprocate. No, safer to maintain his distance and play at the game of seduction. Alexei was confident in his control.

He cupped Schwann's head in one hand as he slowly fed him the potion, Schwann still intriguingly pliant in his grip. Would that Schwann was normally so cooperative, Alexei thought ruefully. For a man who followed his every command, there was a perverse streak of obstinacy in Schwann that he couldn't unearth; it waxed and waned in strength, but like the dark face of the moon was ever present. Alexei refilled the glass with water and repeated the process, eyes on the bob of Schwann's throat as he drank.

Schwann's breathing soon leveled out as he dropped into a heavy medicated sleep. He'd nuzzled Alexei's palm, completely insensible to his actions. That hand tingled when Schwann awoke late the next morning, gaze more present. Alexei clenched it into a fist and tucked the arm behind his back, standing tall and irreproachable to dispel Schwann's confusion.

_You were injured on a secret mission, Captain. I searched for you when you failed to report in. Do you not remember? It was more expedient to bring you to my room than to rouse the chamberlain to unlock yours. No, it was not on your person. Your clothes? Too ruined to salvage. Have you a clean uniform? Captain, it is negligent to hide your spare key in a potted plant._

There was a part of Schwann that suspected the lie, surely. A frown creased his brow as he listened to Alexei, tension strung across his shoulders. But another and it seemed larger part of him wanted to _forget_, the truth a burning brand buried deep that his mind shied from. And Alexei would encourage that denial, if it kept Schwann at his side. He sent Khroma to Schwann's quarters to fetch a set of clothes, grateful that her impassive mask was in place when she delivered them and the spare key; he was in no mood to humor her elusive baiting. Schwann drowsed off again in the interim, and Alexei resigned himself to an afternoon's nap on the too short couch, ordering a generous assortment of bread, cheese, and cold cuts from the kitchens.

While a day's leave to catch up on paperwork could be excused, his presence would be missed on rounds of the city defenses and at the weekly meeting with the council. So it was with an unsettling mix of relief and regret that he saw Schwann dressed, fed, and ready for light duty as evening fell. Alexei let his hands linger as he helped Schwann into his shirt and coat. Each stroking touch was trailed by a fine tremor and a hitch of breath, Schwann pulling reflexively away before swaying back into Alexei's reach. Schwann eyed him with the wariness of a feral animal as he picked at the platter of food, eating sparingly. Alexei pretended not to notice.

"Come see me tomorrow night," he said easily, "here in my room. I would like to be certain your blastia came to no harm." Schwann hesitated, blunt nails indenting the piece of bread he held, then nodded. He knew well that Alexei would accept no compromises in servicing the blastia. Alexei stood over Schwann where he was seated in one of the room's armchairs, close enough for his sleeve to drape Schwann's leg as he hooked a finger under Schwann's chin to tip his face up. "Try not to overexert yourself in the meantime," he added, smiling at Schwann's shudder.

Finally, he took pity on Schwann. With a circling of his thumb that ventured daringly near the corner of Schwann's lips, he released him to wash his face in his private bathroom and run a quick comb through his hair. Alexei was eager, to learn the responses of Schwann's body and discover just how far he might tempt him, to what effect on Schwann's loyalty. He had looked almost dazed at Alexei's touch, eyes wide and darkening with... Fear? Anticipation? When Alexei returned, unsurprisingly, Schwann was gone. _Not for long._

A week passed into a month, then two, and Schwann stayed in Zaphias, to Alexei's satisfaction in no hurry to resume his guise as Raven. It was a simple matter to invent reasons why Schwann should attend him. Khroma was occupied with preparing the Knights' quarterly expense report to the council, specifically the sleight of numbers required to conceal the extent of the resources Alexei poured into the Heracles and weapons development. A tedious affair Alexei would generally aid her with, but instead of presenting another stack of falsified documents to a bevy of old fools who were too complacent to spot the trick, he opted to call a grand review of the brigades stationed in the city. And Captain Schwann would accompany him, an inspiration to the troops.

More elaborate than an inspection, there was a tournament of arms and days of joint field exercises for the commandant to assess the capability of his forces, both individually and in units of varying size. Prior to Alexei's opening of the ranks to men and women of common birth, any comer who paid the modest entrance fee could participate in the melee and archery contests.

He had won his way into the Knights at one such tourney, a lavish spectacle hosted by His Imperial Majesty that bore little resemblance to the practical marshaling of soldiers it had become during his own tenure as commandant. How things changed! Alexei doubted his younger self, idealistic ambitions a flame in his heart, would recognize him now. He'd been so bright-eyed and blind to the workings of the world.

Schwann was interested in the proceedings, as Alexei had known he would be. Though he tried to avoid the newest recruits, who idolized him, the bits of advice he parceled out nonetheless endeared him to them, his brigade loud in singing his praises. His intent stare was sharp as an arrow as he and Alexei observed the tourney competitors; Alexei, amused, felt having Captain Schwann stand on the sidelines watching was doing more harm than good in rattling their men's composure.

Unlikely, in any case, to find among the archers or swordsmen candidates who could handle the transform bow's change in style. The Canary Brigade had been trained in the specialization, one no longer considered worth the investment, and even then Schwann's talent was rare, honed skill wed to a certain adaptive nimbleness of mind and body. Alexei told him as much, leaning in to whisper in Schwann's ear. Stray strands of hair tickled his cheek. He tolerated Raven's choice of weapon, but too many connections could be drawn should Schwann revive a practice that had been limited to a unit declared dead to the last man.

A promising Knight, one Flynn Scifo, was victorious in the melee—Alexei marked him for future promotion and possible conversion to his cause—and Schwann shivered at the gust of Alexei's breath across his cheek. And while his eyes snagged on the red uniforms of the Royal Guard, he didn't react beyond an unconscious stiffening of his back. Alexei was pleased.

The commencement of the field exercises saw them sharing a tent, as the ranking officers. They led the brigades in twos and threes some distance from Zaphias, to where the plains grew hilly before giving way to wooded terrain, for a series of mock battles: the defense of a fortified position and an assault on the same, scouting for ambushes, charging and holding a line upon exposed ground, whatever scenarios they could devise to put the men through their paces. Alexei chuckled at their terrified faces when Schwann divided the mages and healers from the rest, then pitted the two groups against one another. His brief speech about spellcasters being masters at corralling crowds of enemies with area of effect magic yet vulnerable to any fighter who could close the gap, healers always a priority target, was accurate and not reassuring in the least to the Knights who were going to be either swarmed by attackers or fireballed to within an inch of their lives.

It was frankly exhausting, but exhilarating, too, Alexei thought, the activity settling something in Schwann. He flinched less at Alexei's nightly examination of his blastia, at Alexei's order that he undress and Alexei's hand on his shoulder, fingers pressing tenderly along the blastia's anchor points. Alexei was hardly concerned for the blastia's structural integrity, Hermes's work intricate but built to resist the wear of time as well as the blastia of the ancients had. It would take a piercing weapon of exceptional caliber, wielded by a strong arm that knew exactly where to strike to truly damage the blastia or destroy it.

Of course, that didn't mean this was an idle exercise in accustoming Schwann to his touch. He streamlined the power regulation and tinkered with the base coding. The matrices he added might, he hoped, allow Schwann to cast spells with his heart blastia, similar to how the bodhi blastia embedded in his dagger functioned, and ones far safer than the forced overload he kept using despite all of Alexei's warnings. Schwann's skin was painted in pale shades of shimmering light by the diagnostic window projected from the control remote. Alexei smoothed down a few unruly licks of hair on Schwann's bowed head and wondered what sort of spell would fit the unconventional formula. None of the elemental glyphs seemed quite right. Under his hand, Schwann shook.

Everyone decamped to the capital in high spirits. Even the Schwann Brigade, men selected by Alexei precisely for their lack of intelligence, acquitted themselves well, girded with some words from their captain and the gritty determination to not embarrass him. Alexei's mood soured, however, at the official correspondence from Dahngrest waiting for him, brought by messenger.

Whitehorse wanted Raven back. _"Send me your spy. I have a job for him."_ So, they were to at last dispense with the polite fiction that neither was aware of Schwann's double life. Damn that wretched man! Had Whitehorse uncovered Schwann's identity or only guessed that the Commandant wasn't ignorant of his long term infiltration mission, whether or not he reported directly to Alexei? He sneered. Given the sieve of information that the guilds were, maybe Whitehorse didn't care what Schwann saw.

Alexei was still reluctant to let Schwann go and Schwann reluctant to go. His eyes reflected a disquiet at the prospect of becoming Raven again that he had never shown before. And it was this unwillingness that decided Alexei. For what reason did he scheme and worry rather than command Schwann to abandon his guild persona, if not to send him back to Whitehorse a poisoned chalice? Raven's life would be no escape this time for Schwann, haunted by a trauma he refused to remember.

"Do as Whitehorse asks," Alexei told him, "and nothing to imperil his trust in you." There were rumors of bandits plaguing the area north of Dahngrest, the ruined tower at Ghasfarost their lair, but Whitehorse had the muscle in Altosk alone, not to mention the Blood Alliance, to rout any number of common thieves without risking the retrieval of his pet assassin from the Imperial Knights. A boon Alexei could have denied him. "It must be important for him to have summoned you. Learn the truth." Schwann went sickly pale and obeyed.

Three months later, he returned, the white of bandages encircling his neck and arms, from his wrists up into his sleeves. He didn't account for his injuries, somehow unrelated to his investigation of Ghasfarost, and at the shadow that lay itself across his face, Alexei didn't question his silence. Besides, Schwann had such interesting news.

Perhaps discontented with meager contract pickings, members of the Blood Alliance had taken to robbery. Hence Whitehorse's undue caution in moving against them, the guild rule of noninterference tying his hands. He reckoned, too, according to Schwann, that the head of the Blood Alliance, Barbos, was not so innocent as he purported to be when he disavowed the rogue mercenaries, just as Alexei would have in Whitehorse's place. Schwann was to slip past the engagement as guild forces stormed Ghasfarost's outer walls to search for evidence of Barbos's complicity in the attacks.

He found it, in unsigned orders detailing the routes of merchant caravans around Dahngrest and in snatches of overheard conversation between the thieves as the more reckless rushed to bolster their defenses, their cleverer brethren bolting like rats fleeing a sinking ship. A handful of singed paper scraps and enemy chatter wasn't enough, though, to condemn the leader of one of the Union's five master guilds. In the aftermath, Barbos volunteered the services of the Blood Alliance in occupying Ghasfarost. Why, he argued with a shark grin, fix the tower up and it'd be the perfect outpost to protect the very traders who suffered losses in the bandit incursion while keeping his rowdiest men too busy to cause further trouble.

Barbos intended to be the first to challenge Whitehorse then. Alexei wanted to laugh. Uncontested as Whitehorse's control of the Union had been since he founded it after the Great War, as the years passed and he aged, it was inevitable that ambitious younger rivals would seek to oust him. His body might be as hardy as ever, no man capable of besting him as the strongest fighter the guilds could boast, including Schwann, but in the political arena the sharpness of your sword was not the only factor in play. And missteps were costly as a stumble or broken guard in battle.

Could Barbos be made his pawn? Alexei considered it. If nothing else, he could trust Barbos to betray him and in Barbos's greed for power up to that point, men of his ilk predictable in a way. There was a node for the blastia network in Heliord, but another near Dahngrest, in Ghasfarost, would not go amiss, and Alexei imagined Barbos would gladly cooperate for the promise of access to restricted blastia technology and improved weapons. Whether Barbos succeeded in dethroning Whitehorse or no, the chaos would weaken the guilds.

Yes, Alexei would extend an offer. Spots of pale red bloomed, tantalizing, on the stretch of Schwann's throat as his blood seeped through the bandages. Using Yeager, who could do with less opportunity to pursue his own ends in Leviathan's Claw and Ruins' Gate. The contrast of white upon Schwann's tanned skin was striking, and Alexei dragged a finger along the edge of the gauze, Schwann's pulse leaping to meet his touch. "You must be more careful with yourself, Captain Schwann," he said softly.

Schwann's breathing quickened as Alexei's hands framed his face. He shuddered, swallowing, as Alexei's voice dropped lower, confiding. "You've done well." There was a slight flush to Schwann's cheeks under his caressing thumbs, imperceptible had they not been standing so close. And Alexei was pleased.

When he dispatched Schwann back to Dahngrest just a few days later to observe Barbos, as Whitehorse would undoubtedly want of Raven, too, Alexei bid him farewell with a light squeeze to his shoulder, gaze catching on the jut of his collarbone where it peeked out from the unfastened neck of his uniform. Schwann's almost flustered reaction to Alexei's apology for summoning him so early in the morning curled Alexei's lips up into a smile. At their next debriefing, again in Alexei's quarters, he invited Schwann to sit beside him on the couch. The stiff line of Schwann's body from head to thigh, leg brushing Alexei's, amused him. As did Schwann's startled jolt at the tugging of Alexei's fingers on the hair tucked behind his ear and the speed with which he excused himself soon as Alexei permitted.

Thus they danced, over and over. Schwann didn't initiate or protest, stoic in this as his body was not at every press of Alexei's hands. Which never wandered too far, Alexei feeling no need to risk more. Not when even a gentlemanly arm at the small of Schwann's back to lead him out the door had him tensing, muscles shifting beneath his clothes, and would bring to his eyes that dazed look.

It was a look Alexei still couldn't say was anticipation but that meant, he learned, Schwann would yield to him and his will. Each surrender was sweet, a mark of his claim on Schwann, buried deep and unerasable. Or so he believed. Until Baction.

**· · ·**

It was dark when Raven came to, cold and stiff from huddling on the floor. He felt frayed thin. Salt crusted his skin, his eyes tender as a day-old bruise, and he tottered to the sink again like a drunk on unsteady legs. There was a small mirror hung crookedly on the wall. About the last thing he wanted was to meet the gaze of his reflection, though, so he carefully watched his hands tremble as he ran the faucet and splashed a little water over his face, before staring at the clear (_not red_) swirl of it down the drain. He could shatter the glass into shards with one hard punch.

No, if Raven knew Flynn at all, he'd keep a respectful distance until mid-morning maybe. Whereupon Sodia would be given leave to ask around for him in the inns Flynn remembered he favored and orders issued for every Knight on guard and patrol to report Captain Schwann's location to the Commandant. Sodia, promoted or demoted to the role of Flynn's spymaster—there was a confession and several overdue arguments that he avoided despite being privy to the reasons—wasn't yet experienced enough to catch Raven at his own game.

Usually he'd enjoy laying a few dozen false trails for her to follow, forcing her to work her nascent network of civilian informants here in Zaphias, only to turn up lounging in her locked office, feet on her desk as he read her files. Her exasperated expression and the way it would sharpen into determination was a beauty to behold.

But this time Sodia wouldn't have to search further than the public quarter market for leads on which direction he'd fled. Raven didn't intend to stay trapped in this room, waiting for her to knock on the door or, worse, for Flynn to. Mind completely blank, he gathered his belongings.

Spare clothes, folded and bundled together with his comb and sewing kit, a bar of soap, other odds and ends into his simple sleeping mat. A pouch for gels and potions, another for gald. His hand hesitated in reaching for his (_Casey's_) bow, and after he slung it over a shoulder with his pack, hesitated even longer in grabbing his quiver. Full of arrows tipped with the everlight heads he'd commissioned from Nobis and the Soul Smiths. He stroked his thumb slowly against the edge of one. The metal alloy was tougher than steel but not so heavy, more resistant to blunting, and easily enchanted with the new spirit magic formulas.

Fine weapons, worth the hefty price he paid, and it wouldn't take much pressure for him to break skin on them. Raven drew away, picked up his quiver by the strap and, with a quick glance about the room, left to settle his bill. While the inn manager, rousted from bed, grumpily counted his gald at the front desk, his forefinger rubbed ceaselessly over the shallow gash across the pad of his thumb. Just a (_bloodless_) slit in the flesh, no more painful than cutting himself on paper.

At the city gates, it wasn't difficult to convince the watch officer to lend Captain Schwann one of the tamed quiettas the Knights stabled there for courier runs to speed his journey to Nor Harbor. That Raven might've helped the man's cooperation along by implying the Commandant had entrusted him with an urgent secret missive for Don Whitehorse didn't excuse the lax security, and he had to bite the inside of his cheek to not reprimand the guards even as he thanked them. Ignoring the sly looks they exchanged as they nudged each other excitedly—that was harder.

Well, he thought with a rasping chuckle, Sodia would soon set them straight about blindly assuming any story told to them was true, the word of a superior or no. She'd have a similar lecture for the drowsy woman who, upon recognizing Schwann, jolted into a flustered salute and waved him through the checkpoint at Deidon Hold shortly after dawn without a single question as to his destination or purpose. He ought to be flattered, he supposed, that he (_old and worn and dead and still Alexei's_) was cause for a young lady's blush. Playing the part, both parts, with a solemn nod as he passed and a wink back over his shoulder had come naturally.

Raven laughed and laughed now, louder and louder, until his voice echoed distorted into the cries of some beast from Ehmead Hill's darkening wooded slopes. No monsters leapt out of the night to attack him at the noise. It seemed, naive and gullible as many of them were, the Knights were doing an excellent job keeping the main road from Zaphias to Capua Nor safe for travelers. Was he disappointed there would be no use for his arrows? (_What monster could kill him?_)

He didn't sleep and stopped only to rest the quietta, watering it at nameless streams and feeding it from the bag of seed a stable boy had shyly provided him. The gels he ate soothed his hoarse throat, though he knew they couldn't stave off thirst and hunger indefinitely. By dusk the next day, his stalwart mount was in the charge of Nor's small garrison. Raven boarded the last ferry to Torim; he had to clutch the ship's railing with every step, exhaustion clawing at his limbs.

On foot out of Torim Harbor with a fresh box of fish-filled rice balls, he found he couldn't sleep and couldn't eat. The food tasted by turns sickly sweet, coating his tongue like syrup, and bitterly salty, the sour stink of spilled wine and rotting trash gagging him as he retched up most of his meals. It was all in his mind, none of it real. Maybe if he repeated that to himself enough times, Raven wouldn't jerk awake barely twenty minutes after falling into a doze with the sensation of phantom fingers around his neck and a dull headache, his shoulders throbbing in remembered pain. He half expected to feel Alexei's too keen eyes upon his naked skin. (_Captain Schwann, are you well?_) The hilt of his knife was a familiar comfort in his palm. (_He wasn't._) Its edge gleamed pressed against the soft underside of his wrist.

Finally, the grooved shaft and chain of Dahngrest's old barrier blastia came into view over the treetops. Raven clapped a shaking hand to his mouth before he could start sobbing. There would be no dropping in for a friendly chat with Karol at Brave Vesperia's guildhall, however, or Harry at the Union headquarters. A week of hard travel and stress (_fear_) clinging to him, he wasn't fit for company. Harry didn't need the embarrassment, Raven already something of an oddity in Altosk since his identity as Schwann was revealed, and Karol didn't need the worry.

So he slipped unnoticed through Dahngrest's back alleys to the slightly dilapidated building where he rented a two-room residence that suited his bachelor lifestyle. He couldn't quite stifle his wet hiccuping giggles at the realization that this, at least, would never change. Not like his false heart encouraged romance beyond harmless flirting, he chided himself. What difference did it truly make to learn his body had been used (_he wanted to forget_) for sex when he'd allowed Alexei to use him in all the other ways that mattered?

Locked alone in his shabby flat, Raven let himself think again. It was no surprise in the end that Alexei hadn't dirtied his own hands, given his fondness for pawns and watching them move unwittingly to his plans. Raven wrapped his piled blankets tighter around him on his bed, shivering. Why was he so cold? He regretted shucking his clothes without first drawing a scalding bath to soak (_drown_) in.

The Royal Guards he'd fought and killed on the Heracles, during Brave Vesperia's storming of the castle, and in the shrine at Zaude had not seen him as more (_less_) than an enemy or a traitor, he was certain. Fortunate as he perhaps was that nobody called him a whore then for Karol, Estelle, and the rest to hear, he now had no idea what became of those men. (_They raped him._) He turned his face into his pillow, knees curling inwards, and tried to breathe. They could be anywhere.

Even in Dahngrest, at this very moment. It'd been his suggestion that the Hunting Blades not bar recruitment to ex-members of Alexei's remaining forces, disbanded by Flynn, who were willing to defend, strictly supervised, settlements in far Tolbyccia and Desier from monsters. He laughed, the sound shrill to his ears despite being muffled by the covers he pulled over his head. No good deed of his went unpunished.

Walking the streets, though not paved in the fine stone of Zaphias, had him tensing at strangers who brushed too close or stared at him a bit too long. Panic frothed hot in his chest. This was his home. He shut his eyes—deep breaths—imagined the shapes of his scratched, wobbly table and sturdier chairs, the kitchen counter with its mess of cooking ingredients and utensils, shelves and cabinets lining the walls, a compact wood stove in the corner—they were his and well known to him. He was safe here. He had to believe that.

And he was not totally without recourse. The Hunting Blades, same as Altosk and Fortune's Market, kept detailed enlistment rolls that included pictures, courtesy of Dahngrest's best photography guild. His blastia eased its attempts to burn a hole in his lung. Karol and Judith had argued vehemently with the portraiture artist who refused to have a dog sit for a session, co-founder of Brave Vesperia and savior of the world or not. Sighing, Raven wallowed in the memory, just a little.

Yuri enjoyed the show so much he almost failed to step in when it threatened to devolve into fisticuffs; Raven's contribution was to console an unbothered Repede and add that, actually, there was a fella in the studio two floors up who specialized in portraying animals, beloved family pets and creatures in their natural habitats and the like. Weren't they going there next? Delayed, of course, for the greatest comedic effect. Karol's screech of frustration, Yuri's quietly amused "old man." The enigmatic smile that graced Judith's lovely features, as the furious artist shoved them all out onto the stairs, slamming the door on Repede's last bark... Sleep caught Raven unawares.

He woke, he couldn't tell how many hours later, disoriented yet feeling steadier. Hungry, too, his stomach grumbling. Raven (_and Schwann_) had always done better with direction. Grateful, he dressed by rote and strolled a few blocks down to the stall of his favorite food vendor. Customers were sparse—ah, it was early in the morning.

Which explained the empty streets, Dahngrest a city that neither set with the sun nor rose with it. The fish with miso sauce, a couple kebabs on a side plate, hadn't the flavors it normally did but also didn't immediately land splattered on the cobblestones at his feet, so he deemed the meal a success. Thus fortified, he hurried to the Hunting Blades guildhall, hoping that for once his luck would hold and he could avoid the crowds.

Nan greeted him in the front office with a yawn, listened blearily to his lie about an investigation into the current employ of former Royal Guards on Flynn's behalf, and tossed him the key to the records room with a grouchy, "You know where it is, Raven. Put everything back the way you found it when you're through with whatever it is you're really after." Then she tucked her head into her arms, shameless, for a nap right there at the reception desk.

Raven tsked and grabbed a quilt from a nearby couch to drape over her bare shoulders. Kids these days! If left to his own devices on the dawn shift, Karol wound up snoring into his paperwork, as well. They were a matched pair and, frankly, too sugary for him to stand at times like this.

Probably his first smile in a week faded as he glanced from one file to another. Dark hair or blond, long, short, bald, heavy brows, and square jaw or rounded chin, narrow nose, and high cheekbones, plain and rugged, delicate as a woman's, scarred or not scarred, eyes blue, green, brown, an in-between color? He couldn't _remember_. Wary of attracting unwanted attention, Raven gnawed at his clenched hand and didn't scream, didn't cry, didn't make any noise at all.

The smell of that alley, the _taste_ of... Pain shadowed his nerves, ready to scorch his bones black at the tiniest spark upon the dry tinder of what memories he had, and he couldn't recall their spirits be damned _faces!_ Strung by its ties on a laundry pole across the apartment windows above there had been a girl's summer frock, the red brighter than the men's uniforms and splashed with a cheerful yellow pattern. Flowers or cute cats or something else suitably girlish. _Why_ would he focus on that and _not_...? A tattered flyer for a haberdashery on the wall, marred by a streak of his blood. Glint of a broken bottle on the ground, off of metal armor, belt buckles, and the unadorned band of a silver ring that dug into his skin, queerly cold.

_I'm fucked in the head._ That was suddenly the most hilarious thought he'd ever had. Raven, of all people, shouldn't be claiming he was still sane, having been missing pieces of himself for years and years. He didn't think about anything as he reordered the Hunting Blades' personnel files in their correct drawers. Or as he went back to his flat and crawled into bed again. Maybe if he got access to the Knights' records of assignments and transfers, he could... No, he decided, shuddering, he couldn't return to Zaphias now.

Maybe he should just... stay here, unmoving, (_waste away_) until his muscles stiffened and all the warmth leached out of his body. Except, no, Yuri knew where to look for him if he wasn't carousing in the taverns or sleeping off a mission in his room upstairs at Brave Vesperia's guildhall. He didn't want Yuri or—he gulped, mouth dry—Karol to find him a bloated, desiccated corpse, flesh sloughing from his grinning skull. They would never forgive him that. And how could Judith recover from the loss of his handsome face, his wit and charm?

His hands were shaking. That was bad for an archer's aim, though he admittedly wouldn't be of much use in a fight like this. Not the familiar, almost comforting desire to die (_numb with pain, no more, no more_), which he could honestly claim he had experience with, but the distraction and the jumpiness, his consciousness jangling around in his head like loose coins (_worthless_) at the bottom of a beggar's tin cup—he hated it. Teetering on the edge of a cliff was worse than letting go and taking the plunge. Why was he hanging on? Why claw at the frayed threads of his life with bleeding fingers? No, Raven had promised. He mustn't forget that. Yuri and Estelle, Karol, Rita, Judith and Flynn... They were so, so cruel in their kindness.

An idea crept up on him. There was no point to remaining in Dahngrest; it would only be easier for the others to track him down. Everyone knew he had a wandering spirit, so nobody would question his absence for weeks yet. And there was one last major gap in his memories, that he could feel like a missing tooth. What more harm could it do to retrieve this final piece of his past? (_It might kill him._) He laughed sharply.

Schwann or Raven, he was a lying, murdering whore (_Alexei's_) who didn't have the decency to shuffle off this mortal coil when he should've two lifetimes ago. Self-respect? No need for that. Friendship? A luxury, nice to have for a while but undeserved. To Baction, then, after he forced himself to sleep and eat again. He had once believed he would meet his end there. (_Please let there be an end to this._)

**· · ·**

The moment he saw Schwann, Alexei knew his tool was on the brink of snapping. Schwann had delivered to him the Princess as commanded, yes, but from where Alexei had his suspicions and, worse, he guessed that Schwann would refuse to tell him. Lady Estellise was conscious, unharmed and unbound, sitting nervously on the sand-swept stairs to one of Yormgen's ruined houses. As if in mockery of knightly virtue, Schwann stood silent at her shoulder, a few respectful paces behind her. She had no hope of escaping far enough across the dunes to outrange Schwann's arrows, her fencing skill no match for his in close combat or brute strength, so she could only appeal with her words to the man she had met twice yet whose nature she never truly perceived.

And to Alexei's alarm, her naive, artless strategy was working. Oh, Schwann was not so remiss as to allow his expression to change from one of stony indifference when her eyes desperately searched his face for some acknowledgment that he cared for her plight. When she looked away, despairing, however, his gaze slipped to the side or dropped to the ground, like he couldn't bear to watch her. It was as obvious to Alexei as a flinch, though his weakness didn't last longer than a heartbeat each time. Had those _children_ infected Schwann with their sentimentalism? Alexei frowned.

"Escort the Princess to my flagship," he told the guardsmen who accompanied him, "and see that she is settled comfortably, in privacy. I have matters to discuss with my... informant." Dismayed shock painted the Princess's cheeks white as she twisted around to stare anew at her captor, the name of Schwann's guild persona a whisper upon her trembling lips. What exactly did the idiot girl imagine a captain of the Imperial Knights was doing at Don Whitehorse's right hand?

Or was she waiting, in vain, for Schwann to reassure her that this was all a big convoluted misunderstanding? Alexei hid his sneer with a hand. Raven had always been a traitor. And whatever genuine personal loyalty Whitehorse had managed to cultivate in Schwann over the years was now rendered null and void by the man's death, regardless of the unfortunate fact that Alexei had to sacrifice Yeager's usefulness as a neutral party to achieve it.

No guild would dare trust Yeager's intentions after his involvement in the Don's demise was laid bare. With the Union and Palestralle both reeling, likely embroiled in succession crises, the Princess and her power in Alexei's grasp, better that Leviathan's Claw support the Royal Guard than continue to accept independent contracts and test Altosk's commitment to noninterference, already strained by Barbos's schemes. Yeager rowed ashore with his two so-called daughters prior to their arrival in Yormgen to scout the area for the pursuers who were no doubt following Schwann and his prisoner, perhaps Alexei himself. Flynn Scifo had begun questioning his orders since Nordopolica.

Schwann ignored the girl's mute pleading, her hands clasped tightly together before her heart. Her escorts eventually led her towards the ship, her shoulders hunched, and only the way Schwann's eyes went distant spoke to the tension Alexei knew he felt. As for Raven, his position in the Union should not be damaged by his retrieval of the Princess, provided her little band of meddling friends was dealt with as planned. Alexei was close—so close!—to finally unlocking the mysteries of Zaude. While there may be no need for petty politics once he had, if humanity again proved blind to reason, he had a role for Schwann to play in the war to dismantle the guilds.

He stepped closer to Schwann, who blinked at him, startled. Schwann's fingers spasmed on the hilt of his dagger. "Captain, you've done well," Alexei said, his voice pitched low and intimate. He placed a hand where Schwann's neck joined to his shoulder, thumb resting lightly against the soft underside of his jaw, and was pleased to find Schwann shuddered at the touch, pulse a flutter within the hollow of Alexei's palm.

This particular collar was still fitted snug about Schwann's throat; Alexei had but to determine how hard he should pull on the leash to bring his First Captain to heel. Letting Schwann go, he turned away to smile. "You are to travel with the Princess to the shrine at Baction," he continued, crossing his arms, "and take charge of the forces arrayed there. When my business here is finished, I shall come to you and with the Heracles."

Duke Pantarei, Scifo and his brigade of potential mutineers, and the gaggle of ignorant children who nevertheless had a talent for stumbling into Alexei's affairs and served to eliminate Barbos, Ragou, even Cumore. There were too many pieces in movement on the board for him to act incautiously. Baction was both a staging point for his coup and a trap, though he couldn't say for certain who would be lured into it.

With Rita Mordio and the Krityan woman, the blastia hunter, among their number, it wouldn't be long before the Princess's friends tracked her unique aer signature or the transfer magic Schwann reported they'd activated to Yormgen, and Alexei figured Duke wouldn't be far behind them. That man had an infuriating tendency to appear when and where Alexei least expected him to. Given his intervention in Keiv Moc and at Ghasfarost, however, it was safer to assume Duke had realized the extent of the Princess's power same as Alexei and was keeping a discreet watch on her as well as her companions.

Alexei eyed Schwann's impassive face, his teeth grinding in remembered anger. Schwann had dutifully informed him of Duke's presence and he admitted neither encounter was a good opportunity to wrest back Dein Nomos, but it burned to have the sword he'd sought for almost a decade so nearly in his reach. He sighed. That was all in the past.

If his hypothesis about the Princess being the key to the Rizomata formula was correct, Duke could do as he wished with Dein Nomos; Alexei would soon be able to craft a substitute and one more flawless than the various blades he'd created to anchor his blastia network. Judging how compromised Schwann was by his association with Lady Estellise and company was more pressing at the moment. Whitehorse's death was another complicating factor, loath as Alexei was to grant that old thorn in the Empire's side additional influence over what was _his_.

"Maintain your cover," he instructed Schwann, "and send to me any leads on apatheia or Entelexeia by bird." Not often surprised, Alexei was a bit nonplussed at the wind construct Schwann spelled to fly to him a year ago. Caught in its body of webbed air was a short message: Schwann would be delayed in Dahngrest for a month or two by a broken leg. Scroll spat out, the hummingbird-sized thing circled Alexei aimlessly until it dissipated some hours later. The only explanation Schwann offered was that he met a mage who cast fire dragons and that larger birds required too much energy to persist.

_Do not be so foolish as to betray me_, Alexei thought. Schwann helped Mordio leave the cannon emplacements in Egothor Forest inoperable, attacking the Royal Guard in the process, then vanished with the entire group seemingly into thin air. "Have you nothing else to report?" he asked. Except Alexei's research suggested a secret pathway to the legendary city of the Krityan ancestors existed somewhere in those woods and that in this city dwelt an Entelexeia of immense power. Nor was such transfer magic a feature of common ruins, like the occasional energized bridge, his own experiments aside. "Captain Schwann?" _Tell me where you went._

Schwann hesitated. _Damn him._ "No, nothing," he lied and didn't try to hide it, swallowing shallowly under Alexei's probing stare. _Damn him!_ That Whitehorse didn't reveal to him Belius's true identity Alexei could believe, both guild leaders grown canny in their age. After all, Schwann didn't reveal to Whitehorse the Empire's knowledge of how apatheia formed, at Alexei's bidding.

Long had Alexei suspected there was more to the Coliseum's master than Palestralle let on, at any rate, their Duce either a series of remarkably similar men who all named themselves Belius or the inhuman monster that built Nordopolica a millennium before. That Schwann surrendered Belius's apatheia to the Union as a sort of peace overture... Even this mistake Alexei could forgive him, volatile as the situation must have been with Palestralle demanding reparations and every guildsman sworn to Whitehorse up in arms.

There would be other chances to collect more potent apatheia than the smaller stock he'd painstakingly excavated from the battlefields of the Great War. Entelexeia activity was on the rise again. The phoenix-like beast that showed in Dahngrest would not be the last to challenge him or attempt to murder the Princess. Especially should he encroach upon the temples of their ancient worshipers, he mused, Baction a beginning towards that end, too.

He should not be so furious at Schwann's deception. To protect those children, the Krityan woman and her people? Or had Whitehorse's doomed affection for Belius stirred in him pity for the monsters that had killed him and his comrades? Rage beat a snarling tattoo deep within Alexei's chest. He couldn't look at Schwann now, clad in that gaudy, unkempt costume which suited him ill.

"I see," he said slowly, sounding calm to his ears, though his blood coursed pounding in his veins. "You have your orders, Captain." Perhaps he'd been too kind in his treatment of Schwann. As he put some distance between them—he did have to arrange for a brief stay in Yormgen, to greet whichever of his enemies he would bait to Baction—Alexei grudgingly considered that he may just have lost his objectivity where Schwann was concerned. In addicting Schwann to his touch, he had become himself entangled in a glut of useless emotion. His hunger for Schwann's receptive responsiveness, the attraction of bending Schwann to his will with so simple a gesture as the tender stroke of his thumb across a flushed cheek... He was in control.

Or, rather, he had been. Schwann had betrayed him, despite his removal of Whitehorse. And unlike with Yeager, he was bereft of options in leveraging Schwann's loyalty that wouldn't expose his own vulnerability—this unruly _need_ that had eluded his iron grip. The remote to switch off Schwann's blastia was sitting innocuously in the desk drawer of his cabin aboard the ship. If he were in full command of his senses, he would kill Schwann while he was in range, before Schwann could betray him in an act more dangerous to his plans than the omission of intelligence he already possessed. But he balked. It galled him.

Preparations made, Alexei saw to the departure of the ship. Schwann scuttled up the ramp at the last second, to disapproving grimaces from the crew and guards, hands waving through the air expansively as his _lying_ tongue no doubt spun a half-baked story about the Commandant being far too upstanding a knight to strand his poor self in the desert alone, on foot, nary a drop of water in his canteen, and with the heroic service he'd done the Empire by finding their wandering princess. His Raven mask was firmly back in place. And Alexei wanted to scream.

Why, after all he had given him, did Schwann refuse Alexei the heart he was owed? The heart Schwann shared carelessly, in torn chunks, with the soldiers of his brigade, with Whitehorse and undeserving guild riffraff, and the band of miscreants he'd spent barely a season with, under false pretenses, who by his own account would've been glad to be rid of him. When the Princess's friends finally arrived, as predicted, Alexei studied them closely.

Three were noisy brats: a boy of no name, raised in Dahngrest to idolize the guilds; the girl claiming to be Aifread's granddaughter, who like as not was a huckster; Mordio, young for her genius and as socially maladjusted as she appeared in Heliord. The Krityan woman had her charms, Alexei supposed, and was at least a capable warrior; the leader, one Yuri Lowell by reports, still had something of a Knight's bearing and a certain low cunning. With his strikingly long, dark hair, he also resembled, in passing, the captain of the Canary Brigade, but Alexei was quick to dismiss that as sufficient cause for Schwann's behavior.

In the end, the only one he deemed worth a second glance was the dog, as a fine specimen of the fighting breed prized by the late emperor's brother. Duke's entrance and exit was typically abrupt, though it was a minor boon to confirm he avoided discovery by Imperial patrols with the aid of his Entelexeia ally. Even Scifo came, to hurl at Alexei accusations of treason. As if the Empire had not failed Alexei first in its corruption and complacency, that resisted reform and wasted its strength in internal bickering instead of uniting the world's people. He happily abandoned this gathering of fools to Yeager, for him to kill or lure to Baction—Alexei didn't care which. His mind was occupied, as he sailed to the fleet rendezvous with the Heracles, by how he might use the Princess's power and the problem of Schwann.

Baction set the second into glaring perspective. Schwann had disobeyed him. A minimal amount of work had been accomplished, supplies left stacked in the shrine's musty corridors and a skeleton watch on the perimeter; most of the guards were sleeping or playing cards around small campfires. Because the man Alexei expected to take charge of this rabble was lounging on the grass outside, having never bothered to change out of Raven's clothes.

For a mad spell, Alexei wanted nothing more than to grab Schwann by the throat and strangle him, slap him, punch him until he felt a fraction of the pains he was forcing upon Alexei. Sanity prevailed, however. He curtly ordered the men from the Heracles to secure the shrine, one contingent to find which room the Princess was being held in and relieve her guards, the remainder to roust the malingerers into performing their duties. Once the troops were mustered, their attention elsewhere, Alexei walked around the debris and arches of crumbling stone strewn across what might have been the temple gardens to deal with Schwann.

"You are not in uniform, Captain," he said. He kicked sharply at Schwann's outstretched leg on the ground. Alexei breathed, in and out, and repeated silently to himself that this lapse was not wholly unforeseen, that events progressed faster than anticipated, Whitehorse's grandson a softer target than he guessed. One bleary eye opened to gaze up at the darkening sky. "Huh. I'm not," came the indifferent reply.

Now he took note of the metal flask tipped over, empty, just out of Schwann's reach. Crouching, Alexei gripped Schwann by the chin, fingers digging into warm, yielding flesh. Schwann didn't flinch or protest as Alexei jerked his face towards him.

His eyes were unfocused, his lips parted, and the stench of cheap rotgut, that he'd probably wheedled from the ship's crew, was strong as he sighed shakily. Alexei pushed Schwann's head away with a grunt of disgust and stood. "You're drunk," he hissed. The urge to strike the man prone at his feet again swelled within him.

"Well," Schwann—no, _Raven_—said, "I didn't 'xactly have the time ta toast the Don, so..." He flailed a boneless arm, hand gesturing broadly at the grass, Alexei, the flask, his rumpled clothing and generally wretched state. "Here I am! Drinkin'! Gotta drink ta—" His words stopped abruptly, a stricken expression twisting his features before he threw his arm over his face. That rough and slurred _fake_ accent grated on Alexei's nerves.

Did Schwann _want_ to be punished? He could not be so unaware in his _grief_ as to think this disgraceful display would merit any other response. "Whitehorse is dead," said Alexei flatly. Never had he touched Schwann with intent to hurt, though many times his patience was sore tried, yet it seemed all of his restraint was for naught. "Yuri Lowell and the rest of the Princess's friends will learn soon enough who you truly are and that you betrayed them." If pain was what Schwann sought, Alexei would oblige him, with pleasure.

"Pull yourself together," he snapped. "You are of no use to me like this." Then he strode back to the shrine, a plan to reassert his control over both Schwann and his own inconvenient desires already forming. Violence had proven effective in the past at cowing Schwann into a more suggestible state. Alexei pursed his lips. No, he corrected himself reluctantly, those cretins raped Schwann. What if the sexual humiliation was key to breaking Schwann's defenses, pain alone not enough to disarm him when he was fairly drowning in it?

It would muddle Alexei's role, he realized, for him to force Schwann, when he had so meticulously fostered in Schwann the expectation of a kind touch, tender as a lover's, at his hands. And he needed Schwann's trust, more even than he despised the notion that his years of effort were wasted and more than he wanted Schwann's fear, Yeager's often slipshod performance a lesson in the limits of blatant coercion. His mouth twitched, threatening to curl into a grimace. The act itself was crude and distasteful. Alexei may not care for the trappings of romance as his previous bedmates had, but he'd treated every single one of them generously and with consummate skill, unable to countenance less than excellence in any aspect of his life.

Still wrestling with his disinclination to punish Schwann the way he was almost begging for, Alexei had to bite back a growl of annoyance at the two Knights who called for him with a rightfully hesitant _sir_. "What is it?" he said, his tone and stare a little too cold, by how hastily the men straightened into identical stiff salutes, faces blank and eyes front. It would be a trial he didn't have the temper for to pry whatever trifling issue these idiots saw fit to burden him with out of the formal statues they had become. "At ease," he commanded sternly, "and speak."

They glanced around nervously for several seconds, to Alexei's mounting irritation, before finally one said, "Will the... guildsman outside be remaining, Commandant?" So it was prejudice, thought Alexei. Not exactly surprising for the Royal Guard and in members of his personal cadre in particular, these men having swallowed whole his propaganda about the Empire's superiority, the guilds a lawless mob of degenerates who rejected civilization and progress.

Gratifying as it was to mark the spread of attitudes that would make his conquest of the guilds all the easier, he usually didn't have the time to entertain the ranting, defamatory speeches such men were so fond of. But there was a niggling tendril of a memory about these two in relation to Schwann that he wished to follow. "Why do you ask?" he said with a bland look that was sure to incite them. Could fate have laid the solution to his problem neatly at his feet? They did not disappoint.

"He may have rescued the Princess," the other said hotly, "but he can't be trusted, that shady fucker. He's a no-good rat a-and a dirty traitor, too, a damn _libertine_, like all the rest of them guildies." Beside him, his friend spat viciously on the floor with a muttered curse—Alexei raised an eyebrow—that sounded rather like _whore_. At his deliberate lack of a reaction, their anger deflated, and they suddenly remembered just who they were talking to. "Pardon the language, sir," the first mumbled.

Which was not an apology for the meaning behind the words, Alexei observed. He recognized these men now: from the same company as the four who'd drunkenly assaulted Schwann and were exiled to Heliord for their crime, to die under Cumore's inept command. Alexei struggled to put names to their faces. And where was the third Knight transferred from that unit? Did he not have the stomach to pursue what was seeming more and more like a vendetta against Schwann's guild persona? Or, Alexei perceived in a flash of insight, was he a casualty of the occupation of Baction? Was Schwann merely a scapegoat for their misery?

It hardly mattered. He studied the impotent rage branded upon their forgettable features. They would serve. "Yes," he said slowly, "our guest outside has overstayed his welcome." The idiots elbowed each other, plainly relieved they were not going to receive a reprimand, though Alexei had mentally signed their death warrants the moment he decided to allow them to touch what was _his_.

"The two of you see to it that he's escorted from the premises. The Empire has no further use for him as a spy." A barest suggestion that they might find a different use for him. "With Whitehorse dead, at least there is no risk of a repeat of the diplomatic incident from three years ago," he added, sighing heavily. Let them believe their company was disbanded to appease the Union and that they should fear no reprisal, however poorly they conducted themselves tonight.

Alexei held their gazes long enough to watch the dots connect, their narrow minds primed by evoking their crass friends, then dismissed them. Their hurried swagger to the shrine entrance, the glint in their eyes and their lewd, predatory smiles—Alexei clenched his hand on the hilt of his sword, sore tempted to skewer them both over its blade. No, this was the better option. His relationship with Schwann would not be damaged as much as were he to do the deed himself, and when Schwann was left newly fragile and vulnerable, he would have no one to turn to for the comfort he craved, save Alexei. The logic did nothing to dispel his foul mood. He stormed through the maze of rooms and corridors until he located the Princess, taking the chamber adjacent to hers as his own.

Not even experimenting with her power, as marvelous as he'd imagined, managed to satisfy him. The entire time he worked with some small apatheia to create a spell prison that would also enable him to forcibly activate her abilities, the Princess, who was a naive little girl still, pleaded with him and beseeched him. "Why are you doing this?" she cried. "This power of mine—it's dangerous!" As if Alexei weren't already aware and of so many secrets, of Zaude, that she was ignorant of. "P-Please tell me what you want! There must be another way!"

Simpler to stopper her mouth with screams, the formulae unforgiving on her body as Alexei tested her limits, than to grant her an answer she could never understand nor accept. She had experienced few of the world's myriad cruelties, after all; her dreams were intact, untarnished by ugly compromises and unmarred by the senseless killing of precious comrades.

Perhaps when her friends were dead and Zaphias lay devastated at her feet, poisoned by her power, she would be prepared to look upon Alexei as savior instead of villain. In the end, she was exhausted into unconsciousness. Alexei manacled her hands together, securing the chain to a metal ring driven into the platform she slept on.

He seated himself on the edge next to the steps, his back to her, and began applying what he'd learned of the Princess's power to one of his copies of Dein Nomos. Armor and coat discarded as the night wore on, their weight too confining, he was dressed down in his trousers, padded socks, and a thin shirt, the sleeves of which he rolled up as he let his thoughts wander in the hushed gloom.

There were similar low stone daises scattered around the temple and a central larger, columned audience hall. Idly, he pondered what or who the ancients had shackled to these altars; the Entelexeia fed only on aer, but maybe it flattered their monstrous egos that their worshipers were willing to offer them blood tribute. A Child of the Full Moon was surely a worthy sacrifice.

On a whim, Alexei fancied himself a high priest to Astal, the Entelexeia that had once ruled this temple, before chuckling at the absurdity. If Astal lived and unwisely tarried near the shrine, the scouts would discover it, and then Astal would face the firepower of the Heracles and be overwhelmed, the era of the Entelexeia fast drawing to a close. The Princess may be of use there, as well, to charge the hoplon blastia with energy that was inherently inimical to the Entelexeia. He rubbed tiredly at his eyes with one hand. Further refinement and integration of his control formulae was required.

Just when his mind was on the verge of being consumed by other concerns, as though jealous of his attention, Schwann returned to him. Like a ghost, he appeared from the darkness, slipping silently into the flickering circle of light cast by the blastia torches at the platform's corners. Alexei set his sword aside and waited.

Schwann was not injured beyond what bruises the shadow of his stubble concealed along his jaw. Raven's purple robe was askew, hanging off one shoulder, and he had lost his hair tie, his one visible eye focused on Alexei and wild. Alexei wet his lips, throat suddenly parched at the sight of Schwann's mouth, open and trembling and bite-swollen.

In halting and jerky movements, Schwann knelt. Then he half shuffled, half crawled on hands and knees to Alexei, who tensed at the weight of Schwann's head in his lap. "Please, p-please," Schwann murmured into his thigh, breath warm through the fabric of his pants. Uncertain but a frisson of excitement searing up his spine, Alexei stroked Schwann's hair, twining strands of it about his fingers as Schwann shivered, his choked whispers of _please, please_ broken by hitching gasps of air. So it had come to this. Alexei wondered whether Schwann had finally remembered everything.

Whitehorse was dead, and soon Zaude would yield to him mastery of its mysteries. And since it had proven impossible to maintain his distance, this time there would be no more games to play, keeping Alexei from bedding Schwann. Why should he not take what he desired from Schwann, who was so desperate for it?

He responded beautifully to Alexei's hand tugging at his hair, pulling away, back arching, long enough for Alexei to spread his legs and urge Schwann to settle between them, still on his knees. A gentle nudge at his shoulder stopped him from immediately, instinctively bending to his task. Heat pooled in Alexei's gut at his eagerness. He swayed, eyes shut and throat bobbing under Alexei's palm, as Alexei pushed his robe the rest of the way off, then unbuttoned his shirt, sliding it down his arms to expose the blastia.

"You want to please me, Schwann?" Alexei asked, hearing the thickness in his own voice. He curled his hand around the nape of Schwann's neck, thumb tracing the sharp ridge of his jaw. Schwann flinched minutely and nodded, bared shoulders shuddering. His blastia pulsed, distressed. Alexei doubted he had noticed at all the Princess sleeping soundly behind them, caught in his head and the savage riptide of his emotions. Smiling, he decided he liked this heedlessness in Schwann.

Almost he hoped the Princess would wake and know who Schwann truly belonged to, his body Alexei's and his heart. But her caterwauling he could do without. How horrified she would be on Schwann's behalf! Alexei flicked open his trousers and wordlessly pressed Schwann's head down, one hand twisted in his hair and the other a collar about his throat. _You're mine._ Schwann obeyed, surrendering wholly. _Mine._

**· · ·**

On his knees in the grass, coughing up the bits of rice and fish he'd managed to choke down only a few hours ago, Raven was sick and tired of being sick and tired. Why had he felt it'd be a smart idea to come back here? (_He hadn't._) Stumbling to his feet, he tried blindly to escape the temple grounds but didn't make it far before his legs gave out and he had to sit on a fallen pillar, collapsing like a puppet with its strings cut. He hunched over, breathing so fast and ragged he was afraid his lungs couldn't bear it.

Memories of Baction that didn't fill him with shame were precious few. Leblanc's face, dirt-smeared cheeks streaked with tears, peering at him through a hole in the rubble Adecor, Boccos, and the rest of his brigade were rapidly widening, digging at the rocks with their bare hands. Their smiles when they pulled him free, limned by the rising moon. Weary, covered in dust and scratches, yet so open and unaccountably relieved. (_He did little to earn their dedication._) Yuri and Judith, undaunted in their confidence, perception keen as their sword and spear. Flynn with the courage (_he couldn't find in himself_) to oppose Alexei. Rita, her anger not able to hide her concern, and Karol's heartfelt words. While not good memories, not truly, they were his lonely company in that tomb of stone and held at bay everything in him which said he was better dead.

_And now they'd be even fewer._ A sob hissed out past his gritted teeth. It was reckless of him to drink so much. He'd known that when he invited himself to the crew's nightly card game on the sail to Baction. The hooch from their cobbled together still was strong enough to peel the paint off their ship. Easier to gulp cup after cup of the nasty stuff, until his eyes burned and his hands shook and he could totter away, dark spots swimming at the corners of his vision, to drop like a sack of meal on the aft deck as far as he could get from Estelle, her cabin with its guards, her silence, _her stare_, wounded and imploring.

Then once he started, he couldn't seem to stop. Liberating the quartermaster's flask of whiskey, he drank to the Princess's health and his, neither of which was likely to last between Alexei's plans and Yuri's judgment. He drank to Yeager, who wouldn't meet his end at the tip of one of Raven's arrows or knife, and to the Don, who should never have trusted Raven with avenging him or, really, anything else over the years. It was only fitting that he was useless to Alexei, too.

Punishment, he'd thought, when the two Knights came to drag him into the shadows of the forest, and he welcomed it. Didn't resist as they kicked his feet out from under him, forced him to kneel. Didn't wince at the rough fingers in his hair or on his jaw, at the flat of a blade drawing lightly over the exposed skin of his neck. Raven snorted derisively.

Of course, he couldn't recall their faces or names. Would it help, he wondered suddenly, to recreate some of those sensations? He wrapped his robe tighter around himself and fisted his hands in it to stay them from reaching for his dagger. (_A turn of the wrist, and the edge would slice deep._) No, he couldn't risk an attempt. (_Could part his flesh and bleed him dry._) The men accused him of being a rat (_whore_) who goaded their friends to their deaths and needed to be taught a lesson about keeping his mouth shut. Raven hadn't paid their ranting much attention. Whatever they wanted to do to him and for whatever reason was no more than he deserved.

Not even when one laughed and, unbuckling his belt, suggested they ought to make sure his mouth was too busy for slanderous talk did he flinch. There was a yawning pit in his chest; he caved into it, from bones to prickling skin, and it was like diving to the bottom of a frigid lake, numbing. He was thankful, in fact, that the men didn't hurt him after they finished with him. Simply knocked him to the ground, sneered, and told him the Empire no longer required his services.

Half drunk and mind adrift, he had still not been so foolish as to believe Alexei wasn't expecting Schwann. So he cleaned himself up in a nearby stream. At the next change of guard on the shrine entrance, he slipped in, the sleepy patrols easy to evade in the gloom of Baction's halls for one familiar with the security protocols. He'd understood, at last, what Alexei desired of him. And he...

Gasping, he curled his forehead to his knees. His blastia was growing warm, though not yet uncomfortably so. Wet patches dotted his legs in increasing number. He couldn't face his own actions. He _couldn't_.

"Coward," he rasped, the thinness of his voice a shock. "Don't be a coward." What could remembering possibly do now? It wouldn't erase the past. Raven stamped down viciously on the impulse to forget—that had brought him nothing but trouble, not to mention put him in this mess to begin with—and forced himself to consider what he'd learned.

Well, he must've been (_was_) a good cocksucker. He'd certainly had enough practice, Raven thought hysterically. Alexei had groaned low and deep and yanked him up by the hair, leaning in until his breathing was a harsh rasp in Schwann's ear. "I want more," he said—no, growled. Schwann had been confused—he hadn't completed his task—but Alexei's hand on his throat demanded an answer, so he nodded and didn't protest as Alexei dragged him to his feet and led him into the next room with a possessive arm around the small of his back, the whole length of Alexei's body pressed hot and hard against his side.

Schwann let Alexei undress him, sitting when told to and standing, lifting first one foot, then the other, like a doll, Alexei's palm stroking over his hipbone. He let Alexei push him down onto the narrow cot and arrange his limbs—on his knees still, head pillowed on his folded arms, and legs spread wide—until Alexei was satisfied. The grip and slide of Alexei's fingers on his chilled skin had seemed so distant, Schwann was utterly unconcerned about how he might look; it was someone else's body that was being bent and folded, opened and displayed—a tender piece of meat to be devoured, bleeding red in the center. He'd reflected idly on the luxuries of the Commandant's camp and mess, with an actual bed and chair, a table, a set of dishes and cutlery not made of cheap tin.

Finally, he let Alexei fuck him. It had hurt, at first, and he wanted it to. But Alexei was a skilled lover, as meticulous in this as he was in everything else he did. Raven laughed and muffled the sound with both his hands, feeling totally unhinged. It would've been better had Alexei treated him like the whore he was. Rather that than this grotesque parody of affection. Alexei's touch a curious, seeking caress across the planes of his back. Alexei's voice a soft murmur, nonsense words and hushing noises, as he tensed—_it hurt, it hurt_—arms coming apart so he could clutch clawing at the cot's woolen blanket.

It had hurt, until it hadn't anymore. He'd cried out and not in pain when Alexei shifted back onto his heels, pulling him over his lap and thrusting deep, deeper. Raven swallowed the urge to retch again, the taste of bile thick on his tongue. Maybe Alexei and those other faceless men, too, wouldn't have fucked him like a whore if he didn't act like one when a cock was shoved in his mouth, in _him_, begging and moaning.

He hadn't known where to place his hands. Unbalanced and flailing, he twisted and writhed like a worm impaled on a hook. Alexei guided one arm up to wrap around his head, the first time Schwann had dared to touch Alexei as he did him, and ordered in a hoarse whisper—_take yourself in hand, yes, that's it, Schwann_—what he ought to do with the other.

A short, sharp bark of laughter burst bitter and black from Raven. He was honestly a terrible whore. Ignorant in the skills expected of him and never remembering to ask a fair price for his services, before or after. (_They raped him._) He shouldn't keep demeaning by association the ladies who chose to sell their bodies, to survive in dire circumstances or in Dahngrest and the loftiest social circles of the Empire, as a matter of business or for the status and wealth accorded professionally trained courtesans, even for the pleasure of it. Raven had just wanted to be hurt a little bit less, selfishly and unthinkingly, though (_he deserved it_) it hardly made a difference in the end, and Schwann...

There were no doors in the rooms of Baction, the stone halls open and echoing. He gripped his head in his hands, shaking. Estelle had been in the adjacent chamber. While he was sure—he had to be or he might as well slit his throat right here—she slept through his crawl to Alexei's feet, their activities then blessedly quiet, had she woken later? What could she have heard? He was lucky that, chained as she was, she couldn't have seen him naked with his legs splayed wide over Alexei's thighs, mouth panting and back arching as he was fucked like a bitch in heat. Alexei had fondled his blastia, fingers gentle where metal joined to skin as they weren't on his hip, holding him with bruising force.

No, no, Estelle would never have been able to look him in the eye had she suspected how Alexei truly used him, when he caught her up on events since they parted ways, in Zaphias after her rescue. At least not without a telling blush of embarrassed pity, the Princess frank and sincere in all things whereas lying was second nature to him. He was going to drive himself mad (_madder_) with these panicked what-ifs. The abrupt sensation of Alexei's hand upon his (_bare, bitten_) shoulder was so strong he shuddered.

Hours could've passed. Alexei finished with him, Schwann had rolled onto his side, knees curling inwards, and lost track of time. He stared at nothing in particular, feeling achingly empty. Alexei's light touch jolted him back into his body to find it cold and sore. No more, however, than a few consecutive battles of average difficulty might leave him or could be explained by the shrine's perpetual chilly darkness.

"Dress," Alexei said, offering him Schwann's uniform. He had obeyed, of course, and couldn't bring himself to care about the half-dried mess of blood and seed, his and Alexei's and his, that Alexei cleaned off him, rough cloth rubbing whorls into his skin. As he helped him into his shirt and coat, hands lingering, Alexei told him Astal had been spotted, that he would set out with the Heracles and the Princess to hunt it tomorrow but he anticipated hostile company before long, that he had a trap prepared. And the only thought in Schwann's head then was that Yuri would show him mercy, as he had the Don, and kill him in one quick strike of his sword.

Raven snarled, tearing at his hair. Why had Alexei seemed so _betrayed_ when Schwann said he would stay to bait the trap? "You are still of use to me, Schwann," he said. "Let the Royal Guard handle delaying any intruders; they are disposable." _I was disposable, too, in the end._ The Heracles, Estelle, Yeager, his rank of commandant and the loyalty of his men, the Empire itself, his morals, his humanity—what had Alexei _not_ discarded on his path to Zaude? Schwann was certainly not exceptional there.

"You I want with me in Zaphias and beyond, should fortune continue to favor us." Alexei grasped him by the arms, a feverish light in his eyes. Some distant part of him had screamed with the instinct to flinch away from Alexei; he didn't move. "Do not falter, Schwann, so close to achieving all we hoped for since the Great War." _Lies._ Raven gnawed at his clenched hand. They must've been.

At best, Alexei was loath to needlessly sacrifice a tool that had served him well; at worst, he simply hadn't yet tired of bedding Schwann. No argument Alexei could have presented would've convinced him to live, at any rate, Schwann already deadened to the world. That he'd wandered Baction in a haze with a detached sort of appreciation for how fitting his death would be, Raven remembered before, though he couldn't (_refused to_) guess why his mind had created such smothering barriers, aside from a twice over traitor's guilt.

Eventually, his stiff back to Schwann, Alexei said, "As you wish." Again Schwann hadn't replied, whatever Alexei saw on his face during the course of their one-sided conversation enough to change the plans. "Say your farewells to your brigade, Captain," added Alexei, voice hard. Then he swept by Schwann and from the room without a word of goodbye himself. Not that Raven expected any sentiment warmer than a perhaps gloating statement that he'd been a marvelous tool.

He and Alexei met each other once more at Baction, as Alexei left for the Heracles with the Princess's spell prison in tow. Alexei had nothing to say then either, mouth tightened into a frown. In fact, he didn't so much as glance at Schwann. Likely he couldn't forgive Schwann his disobedience, Raven assumed. An idea somewhat borne out by the contingent of Royal Guards Alexei had apparently summoned to fight Brave Vesperia and that he had to subsequently dismiss, countermanding the Commandant's orders, issued less than an hour ago, in a petty squabble that Raven would've found hilarious had Alexei not been trying to deny him his chosen death.

It was easy to forget it all, that death looming assured. His cursed body and who had done what to it would shortly cease to matter, if it ever had. And after Baction, there was no time for introspection, his energies bent on catching up to Alexei and making amends. The sea voyage to Zaphias was a blur, not helped, he admitted, by the injuries that had Leblanc escorting him to his cabin every few hours to _please rest, sir!_ A very respectful insubordination, he'd thought, amused, but he went.

Strain like acid in his veins from overloading his blastia; cuts, bruises, and burns from his scuffle with Brave Vesperia; more bruises and probably a number of hairline fractures from the shrine collapse, which happily was not the organ damage or broken bones he could've suffered. The constant but low level pain was a welcome distraction, really. And there was always someone or something else more deserving of his worry: the Heracles, Zagi and Yeager, Zaphias, Karol, Yuri and Rita, Estelle. When at last he had the opportunity to ponder Alexei, safe in the castle jail cell he informally considered his, Raven was struck by the strange, uncharacteristic mercy Alexei had shown him.

Despite having him in sight and his clear betrayal, Alexei hadn't switched off his blastia, as Raven feared (_hoped_) he would. Why had Alexei acted so contrary to his usual methods? He'd believed Alexei arrogantly confident that no tool of his could harm him, and part of Raven or Schwann or both felt an almost vicious glee at the prospect of proving him wrong.

But now... Raven shook his head. No, that couldn't be it. While Alexei may have been a madman when he died, to imagine Schwann could return to him a loyal dog after Baction and Zaphias would've been beyond mad. He squeezed his eyes shut and saw red splashed bright against the translucent white stone of Zaude, the murky green crystal of that giant blastia. Karol, careful not to look at his firm warning, had leveraged the wreckage up so he could retrieve the mangled remains, little as Alexei would've appreciated being wrapped in Raven's purple robe, that he had only ever viewed with disgust. His hair was pale and fine slipping through Raven's stained fingers, the sensation oddly familiar then.

There was no food left in his stomach for Raven to throw up, but he tried to, anyways, gagging on his own sour spit. The broad chest that had been pressed to his back was crushed, splinters of rib jutting out from rents in the bloodsoaked clothing, dyed a darker hue than Alexei's uniform. Head, arms, legs—all barely recognizable. Just raw meat in a torn bag of skin, bone and gristle. Save for Alexei's hands, elegant and long fingered and miraculously whole. The same hands that had touched him with such...

He had to escape this place, this forsaken place. Desperation lent him a rush of strength that he used to haphazardly gather his belongings, piled hidden around a half-crumbled stone wall, and flee in the general direction of the coast. Raven traveled leagues down the beach towards the port that supplied Aurnion—more a series of temporary docks for larger ships to offload their cargo to be barged upriver—before he realized he had no clue where to go next.

Zaphias was still out of the question, as was Dahngrest; Estelle was in Halure, Rita her frequent companion. Dear Judith and Patty, too, would help him run from Flynn, Yuri, and the rest without asking why for however long he needed, but not only was he not current on where the two most adventurous of their group were, both were possessed of unique feminine charms that would ultimately woo the answers they desired from him. He dropped weakly to the sand and stared at the waves restlessly wearing away the shore, grain by grain. A pretty decent swimmer normally, he'd be able to get far enough that the land would be a shadowed mass on the water's horizon. (_If he didn't spare anything for a round trip._) Zaude lay at the ocean's heart, too.

"At least stop lyin' ta yerself," he muttered, an echo of Rita's voice in his ears. "You don't want any of 'em ta see you like this." Raven chuckled wetly. Except maybe Repede. Much as his nose had sniffed out Schwann's identity and caused everyone a lot of grief that Raven, unrealistically, hoped to avoid until there was a battle to occupy them, he was grateful for Repede's nonjudgmental presence later. The way he would occasionally fall back to pad along at Raven's side, with an unobtrusive brush against his leg or nudge of a snout at his hand, was a comfort when the others were by turns friendly and wary, no longer sure what to make of him.

Not that Raven blamed them. He scoffed. He hardly knew what to make of himself. The sun was setting; he'd wasted an entire day at Baction, mired in his memories. What was one night more? Mind completely blank, he unrolled his sleeping mat. A cursory search of the treeline yielded enough wood for a small fire, and he contemplated eating one of the tuna sandwiches in his pack, then decided to try his luck tomorrow, too exhausted to deal with another bout of sickness.

Raven dreamed of bone-white hands smearing his naked skin red. Fingermark brands crept up his thighs and over his hip, his chest, and down his arms to twine about his wrists, his throat, his face, strangling and searingly hot and he shivered and _shivered_ and couldn't wake, trapped, stripped to some gibbering _thing_ less than a man. He had no appetite, in the morning. With the ease of practice, he ignored his lightheaded unsteadiness and continued walking the beach, wishing the sea could wash him out to its empty expanses as it did, in the fullness of time, all of life's wreckage.

**· · ·**

Between ousting the council and Prince Ioder, securing the castle against Scifo's mutineers, and adjusting the barrier blastia to draw on the Princess's power, Alexei had little time to mourn Schwann. He certainly didn't expect the girl to remind him of her kidnapper. Exhausted by the continual strain on her body as Alexei refined the barrier controls to trap a defensive mass of disturbed aer within the city yet keep the castle interior safe and isolated, Lady Estellise had drifted into an uneasy sleep, curled into a tight ball at the center of her spell prison. Alexei took advantage of the quiet—she had screamed and sobbed as he forced her to use her abilities—to research and send to the kitchens for food.

And so it was that he had a mouthful of bread and cream stew, his head bent over one of his journals to review the procedure for connecting to his blastia network, when the Princess woke with a pained gasp. He released her from her confinement with a flick of his wrist and said simply, "Eat." There was no risk of her escaping, collapsed trembling on the floor and the Royal Guard patrolling the castle halls, and a negligible danger to his person. Even if she could gather the strength to attack him, he doubted she had the resolve to kill him. Her hatred was far more likely to turn inwards.

She made no move to climb to her feet or to sit at the table with Alexei, where her own bowl of stew waited, cooling. Alexei sighed and added, "I will feed you myself, if I must. Do not test my patience." He had no desire to coddle her. When she finally stood and stumbled to the empty chair, he watched her out of the corner of his eye with some relief.

The Princess stared unseeing at her meal for so long, like she had forgotten what to do with a spoon, that Alexei, irritated now, feared he would have to prod her to continue at each bite. But she surprised him. "Where's Ra—?" She shook her head and swallowed, before correcting herself. "Where's Captain Schwann?" Alexei shut his journal—he knew the protocols by heart, the necessary revisions aside—and drummed his fingers on the leather-bound cover.

Why the concern for a man who betrayed her? He gritted his teeth. Or had she, too, noticed that Schwann was not wholly his and hoped to gain an ally who might free her? She would be disappointed in that, and he almost pitied the Princess her futile denial of fate. "Dead," he said. _Just as he wanted_, he thought, a bitter taste on his tongue.

Oddly, hearing of Schwann's death sparked a bit of fire in the Princess. She straightened in her seat and actually glared at Alexei, demanding, "Wh-What did you do to him?" Though she quickly remembered her precarious situation and dropped her gaze to where her hands twisted anxiously in her lap, shoulders hunching. Alexei arched an eyebrow. The nerve of this naive little girl!

Pretending to understand anything of his and Schwann's relationship, with no experience of the Great War or the decade of struggle they weathered together afterwards. She who had barely set foot outside the castle walls for eighteen years and hadn't the wits to see Schwann in Raven. He could have slapped her for her presumption and laughed in her face both. Instead, he asked, tone neutral, "Why do you assume I was responsible?" Tempting as it was to detail for her how intimately familiar he was with every part of Schwann, he didn't feel he would be able to stay his hand should disgust thin her pretty mouth or, worse, sympathy bloom red across her cheeks.

"In truth, I ordered him to delay your companions," he said with a carefully disinterested shrug, "and since at least a couple of them survived to chase after you while he has failed to report in..." The luck of fools, to walk out of that trap alive and apparently unscathed. Schwann had been determined to die, and the odds were not in his favor. Three brawlers of some aptitude, the dog running interference, and a mage of Mordio's reputed prowess to contend with. "Well, I would say the outcome of their battle seems obvious."

_Did you meet an end you were satisfied with?_ Alexei wondered. He suddenly hated the look of the Princess's bowed head, curtained in that girlishly pink hair, and _hated_ the way she acted so gracious and demure, when in reality she was constantly pushing and shoving her indiscriminate compassion where it neither belonged nor was needed, imperious as the queen she would thankfully never be. Was Belius not enough of a lesson for her? Then Alexei would teach her another one about meddling in affairs beyond her comprehension. "Unless you meant to ask who lived and who died? That, Princess, I'm afraid I cannot say for certain." She would rue her prying.

"Schwann was a superb fighter," he explained, "more skilled than he likely let you and your companions see." Her teeth worried at her bottom lip. He had her attention. How plainly did he have to speak before she realized the nature of the confrontation between Schwann and her precious friends? "I trained him personally in the sword."

Hours spent drilling Schwann in a secluded practice yard as the chill of a morning mist fled beneath the blazing sun and their shadows lengthened as the afternoon waned into a firelit summer night. Alexei had been proud, he recalled, at his shaping of the fine raw material that was Schwann when his student, for the moment, mastered his special technique for debilitating enemies. It would not have saved Schwann. The Princess's breathing hitched in what was not quite a sob.

"Your _friends_ killed him," he told her bluntly, "but I imagine he made them pay dearly for that victory." He tapped a finger contemplatively on his chin. "The boy, perhaps, who was so clumsy with his chosen weapon. Or young Mordio, if he managed to close with her and disrupt her casting. And there was no arte of the Imperial Knights that he couldn't counter..."

Now she understood. "S-Stop," she begged him, "Please stop!" She shrank in on herself, hands clutching shaking at the base of her throat, as if in search of something to hold onto. A necklace? Alexei didn't care. Mementos were for those who hadn't valued the present as they were living it, only to become chained to the past by their regret for what was lost.

"After all," he mused, "you were not there to heal them. They must have relied on your power, when there was no lull in the fighting to use a gel, and I promise you Schwann would not have allowed them those chances." Could she picture the bodies of her friends lying limp upon the shrine's cold floor as rivulets of their blood traced the stone tiles? He had seen Schwann bleed more times than he could count, from the blow that killed him to wounds sustained in combat and self-inflicted. The scars were ridges and knotted whorls over Schwann's skin, rough to the touch as Alexei dragged his hand down Schwann's back. "He was too good for that," he finished quietly.

The Princess stared at him in abject horror. "N-No, no," she cried, tears pooling in her eyes unshed, "I saw them. I _saw_ them! Y-Yuri and Ba'ul a-and..." She trailed off, surely remembering that the flying whale-like Entelexeia—Ba'ul, Alexei guessed, and the answer to how the group evaded pursuit, same as Duke—had been blasted by her own power from the dizzying heights of the Sword Stair. Granted, her friends may have survived again, like cockroaches, or they may have been crushed in the fall. Easier for him, if she believed the latter.

"Why speak of the dead?" he said. She buried her face in her hands, sobbing in earnest. "Now eat. I still have need for your power." Eventually, she obeyed him, a hollow-eyed porcelain doll as she spooned stew into her mouth mechanically. Alexei left her in Khroma's care, his aide's piercing glare a mild annoyance. So, Khroma's icy exterior hid a heart with a soft spot for doomed causes. Though, of course, she would do nothing to chastise him or rescue the Princess, just as she had left Schwann in Alexei's bed years ago.

Unable to sleep, Alexei wandered the castle grounds, until his feet brought him to the royal gardens. The head gardener had forgotten to lock the gates in the chaos of the coup or his haste to flee with the rest of the servants. Moonlight shone across a gaping hole in the hedge maze, like the bite of a giganto monster, where the bushes had never grown back from the trimming Schwann had given them with his wind scythe.

Alexei laughed. Slowly at first, then louder and louder, finally so hard his stomach cramped and he had to fold himself onto a wrought iron bench. Why _had_ Schwann been so fond of napping in these gardens? He didn't say, and Alexei didn't ask. It was inconsequential. Forever would these mysteries in Schwann's thinking remain beyond his grasp, as inaccessible as the ancient secrets of Zaude had once been, drowned by the unfeeling sea.

He drew from a pocket sewn into his uniform, tucked against his side, the remote that had controlled Schwann's blastia. There was no use for it now, he supposed, Yeager's loyalty assured by other means. Yet his fingers itched to activate it. To key in some meaningless command—a basic status check or a slight improvement to the energy conversion formula—that would send a signal into the night, to be received by no one. Foolish sentimentality was what it was. Even had Schwann lived, the remote would've had no effect out of line of sight.

It was time he discarded it. He was on the cusp of fulfilling his ambitions for the world, and there was no more room for doubts or hesitation. Gently, Alexei placed the remote on the grass and, in one sharp movement, drove his sword clean through it. The only path he had led forwards, to Zaude and the future. Whatever awaited him there, be it death or glory, he was ready.

**· · ·**

_TBC_

* * *

'Cause I'm a total nerd, I spent the better part of this chapter's second half trying to rationalize the game's ridiculously compressed timeline from Raven's kidnapping of Estelle to his rejoining the party aboard the Heracles. Even assuming Raven tricks or spell charms (Bouquet) Estelle into using her power to activate the warp blastia in Myorzo, he couldn't have predicted where the teleportation would send them. So, I figure they ended up in Yormgen by chance.

Instead of having Schwann drag Estelle back across the desert to Mantaic, which last had an Imperial presence in the blockade of Cados, I've taken the liberty of giving him a faster magical way to contact Alexei. His wind bird messenger is based on the idea that TOV mages can create enduring semi-physical summons (Flame Dragon) and the fact that Raven has _four_ unrelated homing or auto-targeting artes (Dark Chase, Glimmer of Heaven, Azure Heavens, Love Shot). Now Alexei can come meet Schwann and Estelle in Yormgen by sailing up the inlet the town sits on. This also neatly puts him in place for his later confrontation there with Yuri, Flynn, and pretty much the whole gang, lol, after he dispatches Raven and Estelle to Baction by sea.

Once he's done taunting everybody, lol, Alexei ships out for Baction, too, probably leaving Yeager behind. He rendezvouses en route with the Heracles and a fleet of reinforcements, the Royal Guard, Schwann Brigade, and some filler soldiers, as the Empire's gotta have more military units than the four shown in-game. Flynn, his brigade, and other supporters of Ioder disobeyed Alexei's command to assemble in favor of following him to Yormgen or defending the capital against his likely coup.

Since Yuri and company can't just pull up the world map to find Baction, they return to Myorzo and pass a few anxious days searching the city archives for information on the shrine, then flying around Hypionia actually looking for it, during which the events of this fic happen. Similarly, I estimate a delay of two to three days before they confirmed Raven and Estelle were missing—Myorzo's a lot bigger than it seems on TV, lol—and tracked them down to Yormgen to begin with, plus another several days after Baction to heal, resupply (in Nordopolica), and locate the Heracles again.

That should _barely_ give Leblanc, Adecor, and Boccos enough time to dig Schwann out and set sail from Baction to Zaphias on the ships they arrived in. Where they would meet up with the Flynn Brigade under Sodia and coordinate the attack on the Heracles, Raven with the knowledge that Brave Vesperia's coming on Ba'ul and needs the anti-air cannons disabled. Raven manages to beat the party to the Heracles because he doesn't care how tired or injured he is. Honestly, fighting the Royal Guard and Zagi, then crashing with Ba'ul couldn't have done his body any favors on top of his near death(s) at Baction; he needed to rest the most in Nor Harbor, after Karol, and still might not have fully recovered for the trek through the Blade Drifts. Meanwhile, Alexei has plenty of time for evil scheming in Zaphias, Flynn to evacuate civilians to Halure and regroup the Knights at Deidon Hold, the timeline finally uncompressing.


	3. Rainsong

So, been a while. Had trouble figuring out an approach to this introspective transition chapter, and I'm afraid it shows, in the awkward writing and somewhat extraneous digressions into pseudo-worldbuilding. After agonizing over the structure for months, though, I finally decided it was better to post what I had than to scrap it all and start again from scratch. Constructive criticism still welcome! _‹nervous smile›_

* * *

**· · ·**

**Allora, Magari**

_Rainsong_

**· · ·**

A month and a half after Baction, Raven let the hot sands of Mantaic's oasis sift through his fingers and wondered what he was doing with himself. He'd bought passage on the first ship departing from Aurnion and ended up in Nordopolica. Which, while far preferable to Zaphias or Dahngrest, was still not a place he could stay indefinitely without attracting notice from Palestralle and, in a turn he might've otherwise appreciated, fans of Estelle's book or his Coliseum victories. A couple nights of troubled sleep at the Fomalhaut, a courtesy message to Natz that he was on personal business, and he moved on.

Traveling down the peninsula and through the Weasand of Cados, his pace progressively slowed until he had to remind himself he wasn't monster bait. (_What monster could kill him?_) Between Palestralle and the Hunting Blades based in Mantaic, there weren't many monsters to brave, at any rate.

So, here he was. Dribbling away his gald day after day, to the delight of the Antares's manager. Though he spent a good part of his nights with his back propped against a palm tree at the oasis, staring unseeing at the glass-smooth water that was too shallow to really swim (_drown_) in, instead of enjoying the comforts of the bed he paid for.

Raven would sit on the bank as the sun rose, sometimes, the predawn chill yielding to a dry, scorching heat that the residents of Mantaic ducked indoors to weather. He found the afternoons pleasantly warm and quiet. It was the nature of his blastia to run cool when he wasn't forcing it into overload. Alexei had explained it (_hands on his skin, voice in his ear_) as a side effect of the energy conversion; the power requirements to sustain the life of a single person were well below the normal operating range of this Hermes model, the inscribed formulas more closely associated with wind and water than fire or earth.

Breath and blood, he thought. Easier to focus on the continued whoosh of air in and out of his lungs, expanding and contracting, and to trace with the tip of his knife, steel flashing, the blue-green forking of veins along his arm than to remember the dead crystal in his chest or the man who put it there.

He could journey on to Temza, the path not unfamiliar to him. Since he brought a fire lily for Casey and received by divine accident or judgment her compact, Raven had made a solitary pilgrimage on every anniversary of the Great War to throw another bloom from the cliff overlooking the old battlefield and pour out a small flask of the finest rice wine he could afford for his comrades. The second bottle of lesser quality he saved for himself, as he watched the sunset paint the cratered land red, the moon and stars silvering the eroded ridges into a filigree of light and dark clasped around the mountain's neck.

Becoming a hermit in the wilderness of Temza was always an option. He smiled, and it was not entirely without mirth. There was already a whole community of recluses living in the rebuilt Krityan city, immigrants from Myorzo and Zaude, to hear Judith tell of it whenever she was calmly frustrated by how her and Estelle's attempts to coax their people into taking an interest in the outside world were met with gentle bewilderment and, from the Elder, stories about magical vegetables. Would he be able to avoid Estelle and Judith? Neither the Krityans nor the Children of the Full Moon could keep a secret from those two. And there were also surveyors and miners from the Soul Smiths working Temza's everlight deposits, Yormgen transformed by its revival as a port and tourist destination.

It was too crowded. Raven grimaced. He could barely tolerate Mantaic as it was, and its population was less than the Sagittarius's patrons on a busy night. The disappointed pouts of the children who expected him to play with them come evening were equally amusing and painful to bear. Before Belius's death and the Don's, Alexei pulling on his leash (_fingers circling his false heart_), he could pretend at the sort of merry kindness that'd exhaust itself chasing a bunch of giggling kids around in a game of tag or giving them piggyback rides all across the village, their indulgent parents chatting and watching under the bursting color of fireworks.

Now, well, it felt like the slightest touch would shatter him into jagged pieces that'd only prove a danger to others as well as himself. He'd long known he was a bloody mess, his life a patchwork of lies stitched together with the unraveled guts of a dead man, but this was definitely a new low. One even he (_traitor, murderer, whore_) couldn't conceive of or, rather, hadn't wanted to believe.

Maybe the best thing to do was to walk into the Kogorh and not return. Raven imagined his bones picked clean by scavengers and bleached by the sun in the shifting dunes, wind sweeping the sand over his scattered remains until he was buried in a grave time itself would forget. At least he wouldn't be cold during the day. That some intrepid desert treasure hunter might stumble upon his blastia centuries later, deem it a priceless relic of a bygone era, and send it to some eager, brilliant researcher for study was a surprisingly cheerful prospect.

_A place time's forgotten_, he pondered idly. Suddenly, he straightened and jumped to his feet, dashing back to the inn. There was somewhere he could go, if it existed still. He set out immediately, after purchasing supplies and settling his bills. Both the Antares's manager and the sprightly grandmother who owned the corner kebab stand were sorry to see him leave.

By sunset, he'd reached the rock spires that used to be Phaeroh's craggy perch. What he wouldn't trade for Judith's ability to call Ba'ul in that moment, looking up the sheer cliff face! With a sigh, he made camp. He had a hard climb ahead of him tomorrow. If he dreamt (_a mouth pressed to his naked shoulder, hot breath panting_), he forgot.

Dawn was just pinking the eastern sky when Raven woke. He breakfasted on dried strips of meat and fruit, then repacked everything save his bow and quiver, his drinking gourd looped to his belt, into a bundle he tied to one end of the large coil of rope he'd bought the day before. The rope's other end he secured to one of his arrows. Its head was engraved with a modified version of his mine arte that would drill into the ground but not explode unless he fed it more mana.

Raven was glad he'd hung Casey's bow on its wall rack in his Dahngrest apartment, for fear of tainting it with his memories of Baction, and opted instead for the strange metallic blue bow from the Garden of the Waning Moon. The sheen of its spiked edges was bright as a burning gas flame. Its magical boost would be helpful. He paced a distance away from Phaeroh's crag and eyed the angles, testing the wind speed and direction. No more than a light stirring in the air, thankfully.

When he was satisfied with his position, he shut his eyes, slowed his breathing, and concentrated on the perception of firm earth beneath his feet, its powerful solidity pressing up through his soles to collect in his bones like glittering flecks of mineral in rock. Raven had never asked Rita, Estelle, Flynn, or Patty how their magic felt to them, without blastia.

Of the four, Patty's casting style was most similar to his, incantations rough and improvised, but her spells were so varied in effect, he wondered whether the Amrita had mutated her body in ways beyond the obvious. Estelle's connection to the spirits was the deepest, and Rita and Flynn were among the first to master the conversion of mana to elemental magic, the formulas held in the mind and body of the mage. Uncomfortably aware his magical education was lacking compared to theirs—if a few nights' conversation with a lady friend over drinks and dinner could even be counted as an introduction to the principles of magic—and of the complication lodged in his chest, Raven kept his silence about his own experiences. He had no desire to learn there was another thing wrong with him. Good enough that his spells did as he intended.

Part of him wished to ask, however, and be reassured. He pictured the formula for his arte in his mind's eye and was answered by a tug towards the arrow nocked to his bow. Around him there was the prickling consciousness of what he could only assume were spirit observers, their gazes like a soft rain of dust upon his skin. Would it be like a scouring avalanche of sand and stone rushing past him should he cast a more potent spell? How did Rita bear the inferno of her favored fireballs? In the cage of his ribs, a massive presence loomed, heavy and patient as the mountains. _Hey there, Gnome._

Was he oversensitive to the spirits, the four great ones especially? Raven didn't know. Though, in hindsight, perhaps it'd been very foolish of him to offer his unnatural life in their resurrections. He activated the spell and bound it to the glyphs on his arrow in a crack of mana and energy, like splitting a boulder, that echoed in his bones. Gradually, the spirit presences faded. _Next_, he thought.

Centering, focus on his breathing, the brush of air over the fine hairs on his arms and the nape of his neck, a fleeting breeze riffling through the folds of his clothes. Again, the impression of curious watchers—stronger this time, wind his element. Each spirit was a dizzying, teasing spin of sensation, until he felt certain his feet would float right off the ground and his head into the clouds. Swooping weightlessness, like a bird in flight. At the heart of the storm, Sylph, twisting and turning in a dance with the force of a tornado in a bottle. Magic rose to a gale howl. The bow thrummed in his hands, amplifying. He opened his eyes, aimed, and shot.

His arrow flew true in an impossibly high and tight arc, rope trailing and wreathed in ribbons of glowing green magic. Up and up and up it went, cresting the flattened top of Phaeroh's crag, before falling point down on the plateau's edge. _Thanks, Sylph._ With another surge of magic, his delayed spell took effect. Hopefully burrowing the arrow, shaft and all, into the rock securely enough to support his weight. Raven slung his bow over one shoulder, tied his quiver to the bundle of the rest of his supplies, and gave the rope a couple determined tugs, chuckling nervously. It held.

Gingerly, he gripped it with hands, knees, and feet and let himself dangle for a while a short jump from the ground. It still held. "Nothin' ventured, old man..." Yuri's wide smirk, challenge glinting in his eyes, was so familiar Raven could almost see it. He stretched thoroughly, shook his whole body loose and, with a deep breath, started to climb.

The sun crossed the blue dome of the sky, beating the air above the expanse of sand spread to the horizon into ripples of heat, like waves on an invisible ocean. His pace was steady, and he stopped often to sip at his water. The rope he knotted into a crude harness so he could more or less sit and ease the strain on his arms and legs. It was quite the view, though he carefully didn't think about how high up he was. (_Not a bad way to die, quick and cool streams of wind the last to touch him._)

It was sometime past noon when he finally dragged himself over the plateau's edge, sprawling onto his back and gasping in exertion. He wiped at the sweat on his brow with a sleeve, then shaded his eyes with his arm, deciding he'd earned a little nap. The rock was worn smooth and pleasantly warm under him. No people, no animals, not even a scraggly weed rooted in a crevice—all was hushed, yet clean and crisp as the sounding of a tiny silver bell. Raven felt... good (_safe_), as he hadn't for months.

Much as he wanted to, he couldn't doze the afternoon away. Not if he planned to get any use out of his supplies, rather than leaving it all like bait at the end of an unattended fishing line to feed passing critters. With a groan, Raven pushed himself up. His bow and dagger, his empty drinking gourd and, after a moment's consideration, his robe he heaped on the ground. Then he settled in for the long haul, sleeves rolled to bare his forearms and rope looped around the anchor of a convenient jutting rock. Hours later, the sun sank beneath the horizon in a blaze of color. Gold limned the thin wisps of clouds against the sky, lacy gauze embroidered upon a swath of finest red silk.

Night's first scattered stars had winked into existence overhead, though the air was still warmed by echoes of the day's heat clinging to sunbaked stone, when he at last pulled his quiver and supplies atop the plateau with him. He forced his rubbed raw fingers to undo the ties securing the hefty bundle. With aching arms, he wound the rest of the rope in neat coils around its rock anchor before hoisting his belongings onto sore shoulders, dagger belted back in place, bow in hand, and robe knotted by the sleeves at his waist. Raven had come this far already. He refused to sleep another night in the cold.

Of course, he thought, he might not have a choice... But there at the base of the looming spire Phaeroh had once claimed as his perch, ringed by other lesser spires like the points of an eroded crown, was what Raven sought: a distortion in the air, a hanging seam, as if a mirage in the desert seen impossibly up close. His chest tightened—had he a heart capable of such, it might've turned over with a hard thump—and he sucked in a breath, a bit giddy with relief.

He did not know what magics preserved this strange oasis of the distant past, especially now with Phaeroh transformed into Efreet. Brave Vesperia and, he supposed, Duke had visited, slept in Yormgen's beds and eaten Yormgen's food, with no ill effects or everything disappearing soon as their gazes wandered, ghosts banished by morning's light. Well, at least none of the vegetables they bought here wilted into dust at the bottom of their packs.

Would there be an entire town of people going about their daily lives, completely unaware their time was a thousand years gone? He hoped instead for the sole company of the Krityan sage. Bizarre as the sage's tales were, his presence was calming and muted in the detached fashion of so many of his kind. Raven swallowed, hesitating at the rift's edge. Would he be stranded, unable to leave, were he to stay too long? (_Would that be so bad?_) How long would even count as too long? He couldn't know.

There was only one way to find out. "Nothin' ventured, old man," he muttered. Yuri would either blandly complain that he hadn't been invited on this latest adventure or, Raven reflected ruefully, throttle him for running from his troubles and his friends, too. _Always was a coward. That much hasn't changed._ He stepped through the rift, a silent apology on his lips.

**· · ·**

Yormgen was a weird town, at least this illusory version. Not that Raven was positive Yormgen _was_ an illusion, when the very real treasure chest Brave Vesperia retrieved from the Atherum had been successfully delivered to a girl long dead. Yet it was not as if he were truly living in the past either.

For one, every couple of weeks, give or take a few days, in an oddity nobody had noticed during previous shorter stays, time just... rewound. It was a curious thing Raven didn't really have the words to better describe. He might've carried on ignorant even, each day dawning clear and bright in an unbroken spell of perfectly mild weather, were it not for his stomach and his occasional bouts of desperate boredom.

The first task he'd set himself, after waking from his exhausted sleep on a grassy verge at the edge of town, was to look for food. He had several weeks' supply of dried meat and fruit, rice, flour, and oil as well as packets of assorted seeds—herb pancakes and the minnows he was sure he'd seen swimming off the shore would, he figured, tide him over while his crops grew—but he couldn't live indefinitely on his stores and was lazy enough that the prospect of trying his hand at farming wasn't a particularly attractive one. Years of serving in the Knights and boarding at inns, guild coin at his disposal, had spoiled him with easy access to vendors.

Luckily for the hapless plants that otherwise would've had to suffer his attempts at gardening, Raven rummaged around in the shop's stockrooms until he turned up baskets of onions, carrots, and potatoes, heads of cabbage, and a half bag of rice. All of which magically replenished no matter how much he used, fresh as the day the townspeople abandoned Yormgen presumably centuries ago. Stashed away in cabinets were jars of oil and soy sauce, flour, sugar, salt, and pepper. Behind one house, a chicken coop and a fenced pasture. The hens pecked greedily at the feed he spread, flapping about the yard. A search of the docks yielded fishing line and some small traps. The water drawn from the well next to the grove of orange trees was cool and tasted of a spring. His needs met, he couldn't help wondering at the how of it.

Was the food he ate real? Prior experience suggested that it was and, certainly, the omelettes and vegetable stir fries he cooked sated his hunger. It was hard to imagine the wriggling of fish in his nets or a chicken in his hands, the crack of its neck, plucked feathers strewn on the sand, blood and entrails spilling over his knife as he gutted the poor bird (_black lined his nails, his skin scrubbed pink_)—that everything was in his head. Where then did the replacement chickens come from?

Raven felt simultaneously foolish and unnerved by the question. Try as he did to keep a close count, going so far as to stake out the coop overnight, there seemed to be another hen whenever he blinked, the new arrival sidling through a patch of taller grasses or loitering in a far corner of the yard, innocently clucking, until they returned to their original numbers. And the baskets he moved to a kitchen he'd appropriated? The jars and bag of rice? They disappeared, sometimes emptied and sometimes not. Always to reappear in their original locations, untouched, as regular as deliveries made by a grocer sneakier than him.

Maybe he could've pretended that nothing was amiss—what were a few extra chickens or lost cabbages to a well-fed man?—but manners demanded he announce his presence to the sage and tedium drove him back. While the sage recalled Brave Vesperia, he acted as though the others had just left or were still in town, ready to ask him more questions and hear more of his long-winded tales. Raven didn't have the heart to tell the man, whose name he learned was Sordeth, the world had forgotten him and spun on uncaring.

Doubtful whatever he said to that effect would leave a lasting impression, anyways. "Is there something else you require?" Every time, the same words of greeting and the same polite Krityan smile, expectant yet faintly puzzled. Judith, Raven knew, would've done this on purpose, had she chosen to play such a game. Sordeth, however, was completely unaware of how he repeated himself. That Raven wanted to spend a couple hours or the evening with his stories came as a pleasant surprise to him _every damn time_ despite the fact that they'd rehearsed the conversation or one very like it enough to stage a comedy about it.

Strangely, the sage never told the same tale twice. Raven was in truth grateful for this testament to the man's ability to ramble; it was his one reliable source of entertainment here. Outside of manual labor, that is, wandering, and sunning himself on the beach, stripped to his knee-length underpants. Though all the signs of Yormgen's weirdness did make Raven more curious about the magic responsible for it than was his habit.

He walked deep into the fields surrounding the village, until farmland gave way to forest, then into the woods, until he spotted a trail in the tangled brush which widened and flattened into the road that led into town. Several attempts later with no different result, the trail somehow impossible to avoid from any direction, he concluded warily that he could only leave by the rift. And he found himself thinking of Duke.

You could change Yormgen's past, within hidden limits. If Duke hadn't destroyed the apatheia from the Atherum, would it have been installed as Yormgen's barrier blastia and the town remained inhabited to the present? Or was that not an outcome in the cards regardless of how they were shuffled? No chickens, fruit trees, or vegetables could've survived hundreds of years untended in the desert, so did it truly matter whether Raven ate them, anonymous thieves looted them, or neglect and nature rotted them?

Was it simple coincidence that he was faced with an unpopulated Yormgen, as he'd hoped, or did the illusion take on characteristics based on who entered it? Duke had seemed pretty familiar with the other Yormgen and at ease there. His choice, to revisit a brief window in history free of both blastia and monsters? Raven thought himself to a headache but, in the end, not a single answer.

Finally, he consigned Yormgen as a mystery he needed a brain big as Rita's to solve. Life settled into a routine. One that unfortunately left him time to really start brooding. About Alexei. About _himself_. Neither Schwann nor Raven was much for self-reflection, except in the contemplation of his death. He couldn't decide whether it was progress to swap that morbid topic for an equally harrowing reassessment of his memories.

Some things were clearer. When he returned to Dahngrest at Alexei's bidding after... _after_, he'd been tense and unhappy. (_A used whore, broken to the bit of Alexei's touch._) Jumpier than a bunwigle, Whitehorse judged, scrutinizing him with canny eyes. "Your Imperial masters mad?" the Don asked, light but probing. He fought not to shudder at the ghost of Alexei's hand on his bared skin.

Raven had let his gaze stray to the ceiling and along the guild emblems on the walls, arms hooked behind his head in a show of casual disinterest, and said, voice low, "You got a job for me, boss, or not?" He carefully didn't dwell on how crowded the halls were, Union members talking in quiet, anxious tones as they awaited the Don's command in knots of three, four, seven, more that he was forced to shoulder through. Their knowing glances pressed at him, stifling. An Altosk guildsman moved to approach him, then veered off sharply; Raven would've slit that man's throat right there in the entryway if he'd laid a finger on him. It was a relief to be sent alone into Ghasfarost, away from the throng gathered to assault its gates.

Infiltrating the tower was easy. Too easy almost. He was no slouch as a spy, yet never had his senses been so keen, honed to a razor's edge he feared he would cut himself on. Barely had the scuff of a guard's boots reached his ears before his body was ducking into the shadows of a large gear with no conscious effort on his part. A then unnameable horror set his blood pounding, a cold sweat prickling the nape of his neck and his hands trembling uncontrollably. This heightened state of alertness, which he couldn't shake even in deserted rooms, the din of battle distant, made his bones ache from his teeth to the tips of his toes as he searched for evidence of Barbos's suspected double dealing.

Worse still, the Don released Raven from his service much sooner than anticipated given the scores of rousted bandits in the cells for interrogation, Barbos already angling for support among the other guilds to base the Blood Alliance in Ghasfarost. "Go report ta that commandant of yours," he suggested with a shrug, "or whoever's business it is ta watchdog me. I can spare you." Raven had felt painfully exposed. He wanted both to run from the Don's concerned stare, shed Raven's robes for Schwann's pristine uniform, and to beg on his knees that he be allowed to stay a few weeks, a few days longer.

He knew, he realized with a sickening jolt. He'd always known it was only by Alexei's will that he could've fallen victim to those drunkards (_they raped him_) that night. The informant who failed to meet him as arranged, the ill-timed stutter of his false heart—it was too convenient, far too deliberate. But he had to forget. Had to ignore the new looks Alexei pinned him with, eyes dark and _hungering_. Captain Schwann would not be permitted to tender his resignation. Raven choked on a bark of a laugh.

Alexei probably would've killed Schwann on the spot had he at all hinted he sought to betray him, and there were tools Alexei could use to coerce him: his blastia, his brigade, his connection to the guilds, and his shrinking terror at how Alexei might choose to punish any future transgressions. While his mind was determined to block from view every memory of what had been done to him, his body remembered on some raw animal level. The whole journey back to Zaphias, he was plagued by a mad compulsion to scratch at his arms and neck, a crawling itch like insects burrowing beneath his skin, until he had to wrap himself in bandages to stanch the bleeding, his flesh torn off strip by strip. If he could please Alexei, he thought, would he at last be safe?

Suddenly glad he'd supped early enough that his food wasn't in danger from this evening's insights, Raven threw another of the smooth, flat rocks he'd idly collected during his afternoon stroll on the beach across the water with an expert flick of his wrist. It skipped a gratifying number of four times before it sank with a muted splash. Was he complicit in Alexei's deeds (_his own abuse_), for being too weak and too scared to escape or resist? His apathy definitely didn't excuse the murders he committed for Alexei, and rarely did he _enjoy_ acting the assassin.

Because Alexei didn't hurt him. Not truly, no. Not in the violently intimate manner Raven had been taught sex could be wielded as a blunt instrument to grind a person down. (_Did he enjoy it?_) Alexei handled Schwann gently, with a delicacy usually reserved for courting ladies and his experiments. Raven could admit that, to Alexei, Schwann fit the latter category, if not the former. (_Acting the whore?_) Touch was so precious, a kindly meant one even more so.

That so many of the touches which had marked him the deepest, which weren't intended to maim him, came at Alexei's hand was a wound in and of itself. How readily he was manipulated, by so simple a thing! And he continued to crave scraps of affection, no matter what twisted and grotesque forms it took. Raven would've welcomed a dozen more punches from each member of Brave Vesperia to assuage their deserved anger; their paroxysm of feeling was proof they cared, after all, and that he could earn his place with them again.

Most damning, he _missed_ Alexei. There was no point in lying to himself now. Alexei had pushed his way into Raven's head as steadily and surely as he'd fucked Schwann open, cracked his ribs apart, and grabbed hold of his heart. He would never be free of Alexei. No relationship of his could go unmarred by echoes of Alexei's tender cruelty. (_Enough._) It was good as a brand of ownership, seared into the marrow. Fingers twitching, Raven scrambled up from where he sat in the sand and walked to the house he was sleeping in, an awful, nameless tension winding tighter and tighter around his throat. _Enough._ Curled on his side in the gloom, it was a pathetic comfort to feel in his palm the familiar hilt of his knife and know that its blade was sharp.

**· · ·**

Raven had two visitors, though neither stayed long. The first he didn't even see, actually. Mere minutes after he entered the rift, a wave of sweltering heat heralded Efreet's arrival and that the spirit was not best pleased at his intrusion.

Sweating at the possibility that he might shortly be reduced to ash in a wrathful burst of flame, Raven hurriedly dropped to his knees, head bowed over his folded hands, and said, "O Efreet, sorry 'bout callin' on your greatness unannounced like this, but I gotta beg you for sanctuary here." He swallowed, mouth dry. "Promise ya I'll be a good guest. Just need a quiet place ta rest for a bit."

The smoldering press of Efreet's still invisible presence drew away a little, as if in consideration. Raven waited with bated breath. Which turned into an undignified yelp at the lash of fire that lightly scored the back of his wrist, a rebuke and warning in one. "Yeah, I hear ya," he answered, rubbing at the singed skin. "I'll behave myself. Swear on my heart." Apparently satisfied with that, Efreet departed, the molten weight on Raven's chest cooling into something less like the maw of an erupting volcano before lifting entirely.

"Nice ta see Phaeroh's his ol' grumpy self," he muttered, when he was certain Efreet wasn't around to hear him. Then again, he supposed he had Efreet to thank for this Yormgen's continued existence. For all his professed hatred of humanity's ignorance and callousness, Phaeroh had spent what must've been a great deal of magic and effort on creating and preserving this illusory window into time. A past where the desert bloomed and no war with the Entelexeia had yet happened. "Guess the big guy has a soft spot." It was oddly reassuring.

His second visitor introduced herself politely. One morning months into his strange new life of leisure, a strong breeze blew in from the direction of the sea that didn't smell of salt or water so much as lightning and storm clouds. The air in Yormgen was always placid as the mirror-bright surface of a high mountain lake.

It was no surprise when the unseasonable wind coalesced next to him in spirit form. Raven didn't bother to sit up or open his eyes, sprawled in the grass under a canopy of rich green trying hard not to think of anything more troubling than what was for lunch. He'd taken to mushroom hunting in the woods and diligently cultivating a planter of herbs for the distraction.

"Sorry, Sylph," he said, "but for once I ain't lookin' for the company of a pretty lady." No reply. Only a sense of contemplation, like watching a distant bird soar. For a fleeting moment, he wanted to listen to another voice aside from the sage's and his own. He reminded himself that no spirit would seek him without a purpose—he wasn't Estelle, friend or student—and this purpose probably wouldn't be to his liking. "So if ya wouldn't mind vanishin' back into the air or whatever it is you spirits do when you're not visitin' with us mortals, I'd be grateful ta ya."

Of course, Sylph wasn't deterred. She intoned gravely, as though he hadn't spoken, "Yuri Lowell searches for you." Raven squinted open one eye, shock that he really shouldn't have felt given Yuri's character thrumming along his nerves, half panic and half a dangerous warm glow he was tempted to wallow in. "Do you wish for him to find you?" Sylph wondered, head cocking curiously.

"No." That was an easy question. Another thought occurred to him, and he warned her, "Don't be gettin' any funny ideas either 'bout tellin' him, Estelle, or the rest where I am. I don't wanna see any of 'em." They would naturally ask why he'd suddenly ditched his responsibilities to the Union, Knights, and them. And Flynn at least was entitled to an explanation that wasn't some terrible joke, a right he might've chosen Yuri to represent him in. Panic won. Raven jerked up into a crosslegged position that almost passed as casual. "Swear it, Sylph," he all but growled, "upon your duty to keep the balance of this world." His hands, propped behind him, fisted in the grass.

Framed by windswept yellow hair, brilliant as a bird's plumage, Sylph's impishly pointed features were serious. Raven let himself relax just a bit. "Very well. I swear." Hoping that meant the end of their conversation, he made a show of stretching his arms and yawning, scooting around so he could sit with his back to Sylph. She didn't take the hint. After a lengthy pause, during which a sinking suspicion about her motives crept up on him, she whispered, "You are not the only one who knew Alexei well," a mournful note in _his_ name.

The blood burned cold in Raven's veins. "Khroma," he hissed. He wasn't prepared for this. _Shit._ He tensed, shoulders hunching. Was this her idea of revenge for his prying about Duke? Bile rose in his throat. It wasn't the same at all, and if she couldn't understand the difference... He was frightened of what emotions he might see reflected in her inhuman gaze—pity, empathy, jealousy, disinterest—each was as cutting as his wind blades, and he would surely be shredded down to the bone by any one of them.

A gust of wind ruffled his hair. "That is no longer my name," she said airily. Raven snorted, finding that argument about as convincing as his own denials that he wasn't Schwann. "It is true nevertheless that I hold her memories," she admitted. _That's exactly what I'm afraid of, darlin'._ Maybe if he didn't react to her words, she would eventually tire of pursuing the matter. "I know what you were to Alexei."

Raven's tentative plan died stillborn. Anger welled bitter in him, frothing like a sauce left to simmer too long: thick, indigestible, and charred black on the bottom. "A useful tool?" he spat out. "A dog ta run 'round doin' his bidding?" Gritting his teeth, he finished, "A whore?" and immediately wished he'd bitten his tongue rather than admitted that, the taste of it gagging.

She already knew, he told himself, whether as Khroma or via a magical feat of insight, the world's boundaries permeable to a spirit of her power. No apology for her presumption, not that he expected one, but neither was she offended by his hostile temper. Instead she said, calm as Khroma ever was, "When Khroma first entered into Alexei's service, she considered briefly enticing him as only a beautiful woman could into her bed. A man might lower his guard to entrust a lover with secrets he would keep from even his personal aide."

He did not want to talk about Alexei. Sylph, Khroma, or whoever she called herself wasn't going to leave him a choice, however, and there was nowhere on Terca Lumireis he could run to that she wouldn't be able to follow. "Khroma was quick in the end to dismiss sex as a tool to gain the information she sought," she continued, blithely shrugging off Raven's glare, "for Alexei showed none of the appreciation for her body that she'd grown practiced at seeing in other men."

Khroma was rumored to share Alexei's bed from practically the day she was appointed his adjutant; there were many in the Knights and on the council who couldn't credit Alexei elevating a young Krityan woman of no history within the Empire to such a position elsewise. Schwann had no opinion one way or the other—it was not his place to question Alexei's decisions—and while Raven noticed Khroma's icy beauty and poise, he wasn't so foolish as to imagine she was an object to be pursued. Now she waited with the nigh inexhaustible patience of an immortal for him to respond. Raven grunted, inwardly cursing. "So you're sayin' Alexei was interested in just men?" he said harshly.

"No," she corrected, "he had no interest in taking anybody as his lover." Raven couldn't stop the ugly sneer that twisted his lips, hands clenching the fabric of his robe in spasms. _Lover._ What an ill-fitting word! That would've required Alexei to treat him as a person, not a possession he owned. A soft breeze stroked his cheeks. He closed his eyes, swallowing. "Schwann was often away from the capital, but Khroma's place was at Alexei's side during council meetings, state receptions, and the Commandant's annual tour of inspection.

"Alexei was a powerful, handsome man whose stellar reputation was famed throughout the Empire." A fact Raven was fully aware of, as anyone could've guessed. In the wake of Alexei's coup and his death at Zaude, releasing the Adephagos from its ancient prison, one of the thorniest issues facing Ioder's fledgling regime was whether to inform a confused populace of the late commandant's crimes in light of his decades of service and the civil reforms for which he'd been broadly admired.

Estelle had insisted that the truth of the Adephagos's origin, the Entelexeia, and nature of blastia be disseminated far and wide to protect against a repeat of the shortsightedness that corrupted the Empire from custodians to exploiters. On the strength of Flynn's testimony and Schwann's about sentiment in the ranks, Ioder's backroom dealings with the council, and the ultimately quite expedient detail that it was Alexei's blastia network which made Rita's worldsaving solution achievable, they cobbled together a semi-fictional official account that painted Alexei as a misguided visionary whose secret investigations of Zaude drove him to desperation, extremism, and madness.

It solidified support from the moderates and, coupled with Estelle's riveting portrayal of her time as Alexei's hostage in her book, ensured he would not be a martyr to those who shared his militarism or distrust of the guilds while justifying His Majesty's and Flynn's refusal to overrule Alexei's better progressive policies. Raven honestly couldn't say how he felt about this politicized version of Alexei's life. Part of him thought, after all Alexei had done, he deserved no less than to be used thus, more monster than man.

Somehow, Raven doubted Khroma's aim was to debate Alexei's public legacy. He didn't like where this was leading. "Do you truly believe he lacked for offers of companionship?" she asked, blunt as Karol's prized golden hammer. Well, he mused sourly, at least he could always depend on his pessimism. Too bad it wasn't much comfort.

"Noblewomen sought his hand in marriage or hoped for an exciting dalliance while their husbands were away. Those noblemen who were so inclined saw the same opportunity for influence Khroma did. Or perhaps they were simply attracted to his commanding presence." (_A thumb pressed to the underside of his jaw, firm against his fluttering pulse._) He didn't want to hear this. (_Captain, you've done well._) "Commoners of every description fell for his charms as the champion of their cause, and you know well how highly regarded by the Knights he was, even without the prospect of winning his favor and a swift promotion up the ranks."

The one small mercy of having Khroma dissect the rotten corpse of his tortured ties to Alexei was that Sylph's voice wasn't precisely Khroma's, richer in reverberation, her face and form so utterly alien Raven could trick himself into accepting her as an impartial observer. "Alexei had better choices than you," she concluded, relentless, "that would have supported his political ambitions and safer choices, as well, that would not have compromised his military assets, especially one so deeply embedded in the enemy's confidence as you." His stomach turned, a squirming lurch like it was infested with maggots that threatened to crawl up his throat.

Could Alexei have...? _No._ Raven shook his head hard, trying to knock some sense back into it, then stood abruptly, too restless to stay still any longer. Sylph's brow furrowed in the most obvious display of emotion he'd seen from her, and when she spoke again, it was slowly, every syllable picked with care. "There was an uncharacteristic irrational sentiment in his relationship with you."

"Gee," said Raven flatly, "that makes me feel a whole lot better." He crossed his arms, fighting the impulse to fidget and pace, to curl into a ball over his weak, vulnerable heart, or just to scream himself hoarse. "I hope, darlin', for your sake," he went on, tone light but teeth bared in a rictus grin, "that you ain't about ta claim what Alexei had with me was a romance in any sense of the word."

She graced him with a thin, wry smile, her eyes kind. "I would not insult you so," she said. "He was not capable of that." Suddenly, Raven was back in the stone halls of Baction. The light of a blastia lantern cast in stark shadows the rumpled blanket upon the cot and reflected from Alexei's intent eyes in a flickering glint. He shivered. Alexei's displeasure with Schwann showed clearly in the tight, downturned corners of his mouth. _If this death is what you desire, then I shall grant you it._

At the time, Schwann had hardly noticed the way Alexei's voice dropped lower, softened, numb to the core as he was (_bled dry, wrung out_) and braced against the lash of Alexei's chilling anger. _I can do nothing to dissuade you, it seems._ Could Raven trust his memories? He tried to follow the elusive thread of feeling that wound through those clipped words, among the last they exchanged that day. It was like wading hip-deep and barefoot into a fetid swamp looking for a shattered vase; he couldn't peer to the bottom with all the muck, and chances were good he'd only find the pieces he sought by stepping on them.

"Khroma could not guess what dwelt in Alexei's heart for certain, but she thought you should hear from another he was close to that you were..." Sylph paused, before finishing quietly, "You were not nothing to him." Raven grimaced. And what would it prove, for there to have been some genuine emotion at the root of Alexei's actions? He shied from putting a name to the possibility. Not yet.

Betrayed, Alexei had sounded. Which Raven could've chalked up to disappointment at Schwann's contrariness but for the... bitterness lying beneath. "Alexei regretted your death at Baction," added Sylph. "Though how he felt at seeing you again, in open consort with his enemies..." _No, I was disposable._ He must have been.

If Alexei hadn't wanted Schwann dead, why didn't he demand otherwise? Schwann (_broken to the bit_) would not have had the will to resist him, if he'd pressed hard enough (_fingers gripped bruising on his hip_). A strange moment for Alexei to decide to respect Schwann's choice, when his habit for ten long years was to use his tool (_his dog, his whore_) however he wished.

_Even you_, Alexei had lamented at Zaude. Once, before he was Raven or Schwann, he'd admired the new commandant as an unapologetic self-made radical who was upending the calcified order of things in a way that left the priggish nobles of Zaphias frothing at the mouth. Was an equal really what Alexei needed, to challenge him unhesitatingly? Where did he—_they_—go astray? A woman's face, scared but determined, swam to the surface from the depths of Raven's mind. He covered his eyes with a shaky hand.

Schwann met her atop a sunny seaside cliff, the breeze bowing the grasses and flowers at their feet. She hadn't been surprised to see him, he remembered, calmly placing aside her basket of herbs and assessing him with a cool professional regard. His secret was safe, she told him. She had written no notes nor discussed her wartime service with anyone, her family included. Desperation tightened her voice for the first and last time as she begged him to spare her husband and children, her expression easing only after he nodded. _I hope one day you'll be able to forgive me in that heart of yours_, she said, showing him her straight back to gaze across the ocean. _We've done you a great wrong._ He snapped her neck. It was quick. Painless.

Whatever Alexei was searching for, Raven thought, he could never have found in him. While Schwann understood Alexei's goals, even supported the means when it came to meting out justice to smug snakes who'd conspired to murder their fellow Knights, he was too empty then to truly believe in any cause. Raven gnawed at his lip viciously, drawing blood. He could never have _loved_ Alexei, if that was Alexei's expectation, terrible as the very idea appeared in his head. A slim hand perched lightly as a small bird upon his shoulder. He jerked away and glowered at Sylph until she floated back (_safe_) past arm's length.

"Yuri Lowell is not one to surrender without a fight anything he deems his," she pointed out. Rather gratuitously, in Raven's opinion. Which of them had traveled for months with Brave Vesperia? "You would do well to consider how best to explain your relationship with Alexei to him." And after those ominous parting words, Sylph rose into the air and vanished in a crisp green whirl of magic that set the wind tugging at Raven's hair and clothes.

A throbbing ache built at his temples, a matching burn in his chest. "Thanks a bunch, Sylph," he muttered. Lunch was out of the question now, his appetite fled along with any energy to cook or move at all. Raven sagged limp as an old rag against the trunk of the nearby tree and, eyes squeezed shut, tilted his head back (_bared his throat_), swallowing wetly. He stayed like that until his thoughts finally hushed to whispers he could pretend didn't exist. Just a temporary reprieve, he knew. With Yuri coming to drag him out by the ear, he wouldn't get many more openings to escape from the others or himself.

**· · ·**

_TBC_


End file.
